In fairness to the register they also ridicule moving to a dedicatdd ERP in the same article.

Youre right there is nothing wrong with Excel. Its powerful software and ultimately it cones down to human and organisational processes about whether its any good or not. You can have the most expensive top end dedicated ERP in the world and still be a total mess… Similarly business used to run on pen and paper and could EB highly efficient.

Software is just a tool, and organisation go wrong when they think it alone is the solution to their problems.

Also I doubt Health NZ overspend has anything whatsoever to do with excel. Instead it’ll be due to rising demand, and inflationary pressures on public finances. We have the exact problems here in the UK with the NHS just scaled up to a £182bn.