Invalid point: Formulae are easy to follow and audience can easily verify/reproduce your work.
My friend, excel rocks when MAKING a spreadsheet, but it can be hellishly annoying to follow. when you got a long chain of formulae cells, it is very annoying to trace the data through it to see where it is coming form. Sure, a properly labelled Sheet takes care of it, but that's not usually the case. That's the main reason i am very excited about that excel-sheet visualization tool posted here the other day.
PS I'm also very excited for that tool. Will make my life so much easier.
>> Invalid point: Formulae are easy to follow and audience can easily verify/reproduce your work.
Actually this is another valid point of Excel.
Unless the financial model was done incorrectly (using VBA, complicated formula chains, unclear logic), it is very easy to verify financial model in Excel, which is a big plus.
Your spreadsheets would be big because of quantity of different things included, not because of complexity of those things