When I started my thesis there was a graph passed around essentially outlining the difference between Latex and traditional word processing, and it essentially looked like http://bit.ly/ZAtwNi, with word processing packages starting off easier but exponentially getting more difficult to use and Latex being harder to start with, but easier in the long run.
I feel like the same thing applies to Excel. Essentially what gets built with Excel are small programs where all the variables are unnamed, everything passed around is a numerical value and there's almost no capacity to see the entire 'program'.
These always get built because Excel is easier to start with (and you can always pass an Excel spreadsheet around and let other people 'run' it), but it means in the long run with the bigger programs you hit exponential complexity pretty quickly and by then you're invested in Excel, even though R or Pandas would have been more appropriate for the size of the program. Just my two cents (coming from businesses that LOVE excel for completely insane purposes).
I feel like the same thing applies to Excel. Essentially what gets built with Excel are small programs where all the variables are unnamed, everything passed around is a numerical value and there's almost no capacity to see the entire 'program'.
These always get built because Excel is easier to start with (and you can always pass an Excel spreadsheet around and let other people 'run' it), but it means in the long run with the bigger programs you hit exponential complexity pretty quickly and by then you're invested in Excel, even though R or Pandas would have been more appropriate for the size of the program. Just my two cents (coming from businesses that LOVE excel for completely insane purposes).