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Would it be any different if you used a different tool and/or programmed everything manually?

In my experience, it would be 50x worse because Excel handles for you a lot of things that are extremely time consuming to code manually. (eg. error handling)

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Maintainability » everything else.

Basically on the long term the possibility to use real code that is easy to change and understand will save you incredible amounts of time. If you reach a point where your code is too complicated that you are afraid to change anything, you're basically stuck.

I guess it depends on what you mean by worse. In my case, I abandoned excel and rebuilt the tool as a web app using Vue.js, Chart.js, Firebase, etc., which is what ProjectionLab is now. More overall development work, but the end result is way better than a spreadsheet.

But would you say using that web stack initially would have been overkill?

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