One of the amusing/annoying things I've learned when working with business/finance people is how the spreadsheet seems for them to be a freeform tableau with which to conveniently display an assortment of calculations, as opposed to a structured data format.

For example, I'm inclined to list financial data in this somewhat-normalized format in an Excel spreadsheet:

        Apples	1/10/2013	40	$50
	Oranges	1/12/2013	12	$200
	Apples	1/15/2013	30	$80
	Oranges	2/1/2013	10	$40
	Pears	2/2/2013	50	$100
	Pears	2/9/2013	20	$40

However, people I've partnered with, and who most definitely (I think) have a better grounding in financial math than I do, might structure their spreadsheet like this:

    Apples  1/10/2013   40  $50     Oranges 2/1/2013    10  $40
    Apples  1/15/2013   30  $80     Oranges 1/12/2013   12  $200
    Total Apples:       70  $130    Total Oranges:      22  $240

                                Pears   2/2/2013    50  $100
                                Pears   2/9/2013    20  $40
                                Total Pears:        70  $140

(you can imagine the bespoke text-formatting/cell-coloring that also ends up as part of the spreadsheet)

While I understand that their priority is to not care about data processing...not only is this format extremely annoying to machine parse, but it seems unwieldy for any professional use case. When you want to add more rows to each category, you're going to run into layout problems, for one thing. And at some point, your wrists are going to get a nice dose of carpal tunnel syndrome from all the clicking-to-navigate that you end up doing.