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I used to work in the aerospace industry. The engineers had spreadsheets that consisted of three visual elements: Cells for the input and output filenames, and a "Run" button.

It had once been company policy that engineers didn't have compilers or other programming tools on their computers (because "we have programmers for that"). But engineers are a resourceful lot, and they did have Excel with VBA.

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I still find it useful to use Excel as a GUI. I created all sorts of models that takes lots of configuration tables as inputs. There is no faster UI for someone to fill and modify a table than Excel, so all configuration files are excel spreadsheets.

On the “we have programmers for that”, I see another culprit appearing: IT security, who decided unilaterally that everone else in the 100k people organisation only needs Office and are trying to impose security solutions based on that assumption. That includes application whitelisting, or automatically encrypting all office documents (as a result non office programs can’t consume spreadsheets anymore), etc.

>> because "we have programmers for that"

I hope it was long time ago. That's the most idiotic policy I've ever heard. :-)

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