I understand your concern Jeff, infact you made a valid point by saying that

"You can either spend time writing custom automations for all 50 users, or you can teach them to become self sufficient".

Also, i'm not advocating excel+VBA as a new full scale reporting tool, but my case was altogether different, all the reports were already running (partially) fine in our web application where users would click on the "Download to excel" and use the excel sheet thus generated..

BUT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

After this they spent another 15 min for formatting it the way they wanted,

for example whenever a large number like 7856556645452 gets exported in excel it doesn't appear as it should rather it takes the exponential form 7.85e10 also it get rounded off and bla bla bla.......

I even solved it by modifying the stored proc which fetched this data as ' ' + 7856556645452 but after a couple of days later i found that the stored procedure was doing more on the part of formatting the data than on fetching it, hence finally pestered with the daily arising new issues i took the help of VBA.

Some people have commented that code written this way is not maintainable, i agree coz any change in the data requirement would require the query in the macro to be modified but again why would you write plain text queries for what can be achieved through a stored procedure.