Excel is terrifying. Each employee has taken the same concept and written their own bespoke tooling around it which probably has at least one bug. These are "copy and pasted" around a bazillon network drives and then passed on to other people who will modify the undocumented process based on their best understanding of what they think it does (or what it was meant to do...?).
I can still take my ad hoc SQL query data and run decent analysis and produce graphical summaries in less time than it would take me to setup the boilerplate I'd need in C#.
Arguably something like Matlab or R would be similarly quick for a lot of things - but I'm not even slightly sold that they are safer based on my observations of their use. I've certainly seen plenty of formal code that was less readable than a decent spreadsheet.
I'm not really a fan of excel tools, and tooling. VBA has made me want to actually smash my computer in the past. But to claim that it isn't incredibly powerful at working with a few megabytes of raw data is flat out wrong.
I can still take my ad hoc SQL query data and run decent analysis and produce graphical summaries in less time than it would take me to setup the boilerplate I'd need in C#.
Arguably something like Matlab or R would be similarly quick for a lot of things - but I'm not even slightly sold that they are safer based on my observations of their use. I've certainly seen plenty of formal code that was less readable than a decent spreadsheet.
I'm not really a fan of excel tools, and tooling. VBA has made me want to actually smash my computer in the past. But to claim that it isn't incredibly powerful at working with a few megabytes of raw data is flat out wrong.