Excel remains a tool.
It can be a really powerful one I agree. It's simple to use, a lot of people knows how to handle it. And it's probably one of the best tools to do some quick data analysis.
However, like every tool, it has its pros & cons. One of the main cons, IMHO, is that data tends to be mixed with processing a lot (but it also simplify usage, so...).
Overall spreadsheets have been really helpful. Retrospectively, there is a good reason why it triggered the personal computers boom in the 80ies. They are good adhoc tools that can help lot. And Excel is the dominant one.
However, there are tons of horror stories around Excel, worst case scenario, it has lead to wrong decisions affecting the world economy.
I've personally a few horror stories (fortunately, not affecting the world economy).
At my last job, we used an internal spreadsheet to evaluate costs and margins when answering contract bids. This spreadsheet was a monstrosity taking ages to compute and it was a nightmare to manage, sync, and share between all the participants.
I've also seen the traditional "on what did you work last week" spreadsheet, quite annoying to update, even more given that my workstation is under Linux...
I've also seen spreadsheets as specification documents, generating an xml file, which in turn, through some xslt, was used to generate C++/C++ headers files describing an interface between two sub-systems. The concept (automating spec to code translation) was really interesting. However, I don't know about you, but I personally hate to have MS Office in the tool chain used to compile a piece of software, specially when it targets Linux and only Linux...
But those are not the most terrifying spreadsheets I've seen. The most terrifying on was a giant spreadsheet basically managing every aspects of a huge project (thousands of piece of equipment, hundreds of sites). This document was so big it took several hours just to open it. It was like a giant CMDB of all the configuration items, and, trust me there were a lot. But it also did more, a lot more. It was generating configuration files for applications, background images for monitoring maps, firewall rules... It was also a tool that helped architect and size the number of equipment required for a given site. I probably don't know the full extent of its functionalities. Just to give you an idea of its complexity, at one point, even the number of cells in a whole excel document was reached (with Office 2003 however).
All the auto-generated stuff were always kind of wrong and had to be fixed by hand, which made for a repetitive, annoying and error prone process. Also, there was no clear naming convention, and it was a mess to take the generated stuff and load it in our automation scripts.
It was, de-facto, a huge piece of software with no versioning, tests or QA and it showed.
There was only one guy behind it, basically managing the beast full time. When he was sick or on PTO, the whole project was impacted. And when he left, it was a huge mess, nobody was able to take over.
Spreadsheets are great, but past an adhoc usage, please, please, please, implement something more serious. And also, keep track of Excel usage to avoid these kinds of monsters. Often there are real needs behind these beasts, but Excel is a really horrible choice in the long run.
Related commitstrip:
http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2014/12/19/the-coder-and-the-b...