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So you can do something useful with Excel ... now that's a surprise!

Well.. this is a bit silly, given that half the world's businesses run on Excel. It's an incredibly powerful and useful piece of software despite its (numerous) shortcomings.

People don't use Excel because it is powerful in an absolute sense, they use it because it is the most powerful tool they can use without having to talk to the IT department or pay a developer.

Everything is relative and evidently a (good) programmer can wield even more "power" another factor but that comes with its own shortcomings in terms of cost, time, maintenance etc.

I stand by the point that Excel is an extremely powerful tool. It is very easy as a developer to dismiss that but for the "normal" people in the world the productivity gains it affords (with a much smaller learning curve cf. programming) are huge.

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