I can only imagine the thousands of lines of code I saved by using Excel '97 for a scientific tabular calculation effort alone.

Because I had already done about the same thing in HP basic before PC's existed, when there wasn't a spreadsheet app anyway.

And it was on my mind the whole time.

It didn't take many more years before clients wanted their results in XLS on one tab and the invoice on another tab. Rather than the DOC files they had been wanting, which were reasonable facsimiles of the top linen typewritten paperwork I used to fax then mail by USPS or Fedex at the beginning. With the original invoice attached using a "gold" paperclip, nothing ever stapled or folded.

Oh how low I have sunk since then :\

Anyway it was pretty easy to switch from Word to Excel using the same fonts and similar formatting, even though direct integration was provided for, I just switched. When clients printed it they looked almost indistinguishable from my old typewritten multi-font documents.

And that just happened to put the paperwork onto the same spreadsheet as the data. Left one blank tab for future AI use, and the two tabs to send to the clients are in place to the right of that.

Eventually there were quite a few tabs in between the blank placeholder and the final two tabs that the clients would receive. Each with its own function to further leverage built-in Excel capabilities and make further progress toward a "paperless" office.

Saved gobs of code there too, but it gets "worse" from here ;)

It all came together by writing more VBA modules until there was an automation "shell" around the working system. Once complete it would stop so you could look at the data, decide what to type into the blank tab ("naturally", in the absence of AI) then hit the button.

And you were done.

while I don't doubt that such situations also exist, that wasn't the reason for any of the many "Excel abusers" I've encountered in different positions. Quite to the contrary, these people all had access to the appropriate tools, but their whole thinking was totally formatted and fixated on Excel as their go-to tool for everything:

be it things better done with a database, a word processor, a diagramming program, a label generator, a Form editor, a markup language, a web page, anything: they had all the tools at their disposal but no, no, they felt the odd compulsive need to do it with only Excel instead…

…often leading to problems down the line when the limitations of Excel for the use case (for which it wasn't made) would show more and more but they wasted already so much time and (needless) effort doing it in Excel that they would be even more reluctant to the possibility of switching to any more appropriate tool for the task.

Bingo. Working in an automotive OEM the entire company works on excel specifically excel vb scripts. No one knows why and no one has figured out how we got here. But it’s slow and steady abuse excel.

Largely, yes. Another department built a Python script that mostly was a driver for Selenium, because while they weren’t allowed direct access to some DB, nothing stopped them from automating a script to click various buttons in the shitty IE6 web app and scrape the results. I also recall they found that while passwords for said web app needed to be changed every N days, there was no lookback, so they had the script rotate between two passwords.

In my case, another not-insignificant factor was that multiple people on the team were quite good at abusing Excel and VBA, but only two others knew any other programming languages. One of them was an engineer (not SWE, engineer as in fab tool engineer - I think he was an EE) who occasionally wrote stuff in C for fun, and the other was also an engineer, but one who had convinced management that we should create an in-house SWE team. Great idea, and we weren’t the first to do so; unfortunately our manager was abruptly replaced, and his successor saw no value in the proposition.

Also how the simplest, fastest and most secure way to send someone from another corporation a file for collaboration is an encrypted zip and phone in the password.