I have converted the “green bar” paper reports to .csv files for Excel spreadsheets. I do not mind COBOL, I just dislike the reports with a header on each page. It is much easier to write the header once. Most ‘users’ are comfortable with spreadsheets.
I started on a Honeywell mainframe the got a job in an IBM shop and never looked back. Back then the IT department was call EDP for electronic data processing.
Use Java to convert the csv to xls. csv’s work great until someone associates it with notepad and then it is your fault it doesn’t open in excel.