EVE Online has the nickname "Spreadsheets in Space" for a reason, though. There are many aspects of the game where you don't need a spreadsheet, so you're not forced to play this part of the game. However, if you want to do anything serious within research, production or sales, then spreadsheets quickly become your friends. And API calls and scripting.
I just wanted to add how much farther that the "Spreadsheets" analogy goes with a few examples:
There are actually custom ERP and management resources that have been developed by the eve community like the Alliance Auth project and a large group has even a issued a cryptocurrency to automatically manage in-game payouts for certain types of ship losses.
There are the requisite and copious discord, irc, and xmpp integrations, but there are also automated mapping projects, and large scale data analysis projects.
There are projects which seek to analyze ship losses for intelligence and counter intelligence purposes. There are background checks, escrow services, automatic billing service for eg logistics (trucking services) and in fact there have been several functional _casinos_.
The excel plugin looks to add a lot of additional capability to the spreadsheets, since now you can integrate all of this information into whatever analytics you would like to create with excel, which is of course quite powerful.
The "old UI circa 2010" is like the second refresh, and the game already had the reputation back in 2007 when I started playing. It refers to the big business players, who actually play the game like they're real life companies.
I was guessing at the date, because I started shortly after launch when I was a wee lad. The way I remember it is the joke was because of the way every window had rows and boxes, with data inside. I don't actually recall people using actual excel spreadsheets for much other than enjoying the meme because a lot of the things we use excel for in industry now did not exist yet at the time. (Maybe comparing ship stats before the compare tool got better?)
I'm not so much arguing with you as presenting how I remember it. We could both be right, or one or the other, it's not important... I'm just an old scordite miner getting ready to retire, so out of the generosity in my heart, anybody who sends me some ISK today, I'll go ahead and double it - no strings attached. It's time to get out of the game anyway.
