My sister started a new position that involves HTML. She tried to explain an issue to me, but I'm not a web guy. I told her to send it to me on Monday and she sent this...
You know how people say "Devil you know is better than God you don't"?
Excel is that Devil people know. It's not the best tool for a lot of stuffs but it let's people do things.
I saw a co-worker generate sequence for formula in excel for another cell in excel. They wanted to do average of all January data, instead of averageif/sumif/countif etc, they generated a sequence a1+a13+a25...... And used excels' drag down thing to make the formula. I'm like who could even verify it.
Sounds like the boss wanted a grid layout of some kind. Honestly, if they can express themselves in Excel, and they can be made to understand the limitations of responsive Web design, then it's not so bad. At least it's a requirement and you don't have to guess.