Excel is made for calculations. But if you make it hard to make a DB, people will abuse Excel as a DB.

I mean, it might have been at first, but Microsoft figured out that the majority of users for lists without formulas in 1993 and they've strategized around that. IMHO, the biggest concession to this was when they added Power Query to core Excel in 2016.

Excel has sheets for tables, columns and rows, primary keys (UNIQUE), foreign key references etc if you squint.

It doesn't require you use all of that properly, but it's there.

or reimplement excel with sqlite as a backend :-D

BTW sqlite can run SQL queries on CSV files with relatively simple one-liner command...

Well heck can't someone make an SQLite extension that is basically just a simplified Excel ?

and excel has gui for forms

Only where VBA is available. Not available for MacOs versions if I'm correct?

VBA is just there for backward compatibility.

The modern alternative is to use JavaScript/TypeScript, which makes such solutions cross platform (including MacOs, web etc.):

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/overvie...