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I work with engineers (mostly mechanical) who are in the same boat. We built a quick python app to do in ~30 seconds what their excel/VBA shit fest did in 45 minutes.

Excel and the like are better than nothing and for most non programmer numbers people probably fine - but if you need some real heavy lifting I would bring in the bug guns.

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I like that -- Programming should be called a bug gun more often. How can we get more bugs in here, lets bring out the bug guns!!

Not saying that I don't believe you, but I've never seen a VBA code that executes longer than 1-2 minutes. What exactly does one do that takes so long?

copy the spreadsheet, modify some code because the need is sightly different (or the spreadsheet need adjustment) and voila. Either it works just fine on the first time, either you just begun a one hour debugging session.

To me excel is just fine, except when its not. A French bank lost 6 billion ten years ago because one market maker made false entry on a spreadsheat and no one in the back office noticed for more than 2 years. And the back office was not at fault here.

e.g. when reading in data one cell at a time instead of reading in a range at once. Basically inefficient programming. It's probably not that much about Python vs Excel but more difference in knowledge/expertise/capabilities.

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