I personally am not fan of Excel, even though you can do a lot in it, I prefer other programming languages. But I can see its huge popularity among the "cool" office workers. Learning the functions in Excel its pretty easy and powerful at the same time.

Take my uncle for example. He is mediocre office worker, selling lawn-mowers for living. He took the time and learned some advance excel functions and created few cool spreadsheets for his office, and everyone loves it. His reputation grown a lot with bosses and e is known as the guy with solutions.