You definitely don't want to be using Excel for heavy data analysis or statistical analysis, and unfortunately some companies refuse to acknowledge that. Performance is very often sacrificed for familiarity and ease-of-use in business.
This does not mean that a spreadsheet couldn't be an important piece of the pipeline though. Database to Spreadsheet is actually a very powerful combination, particularly with views.
I worked at a company where our data was in SQL Server but we basically had to import the entire data set into Excel because none of the higher-ups knew SQL and wouldn't be able to peer review. Those spreadsheets were slooooooow.
It's funny, the other co-founder of Efficito is a financial analyst who writes tools to do his analysis for him in Lisp. He also maintains a Common Lisp implementation. Fortunately I bet your former employer would not be interested in his services.
It includes some code snippets and screen shots of hybrid Java/Lisp programs. He is also a maintainer of Armed Bear Common Lisp.
And practically everywhere else, that's why we're not writing web apps in assembler.
A. Because most developers aren't anywhere near familiar enough with assembler to do so and because ruby/python/php/etc are much much easier to use for developing a web app.