> Combine them with ST2's ability to do a search and place cursors at every found location, and I can get a lot of weird stuff done quickly.

Combine this with excel (use \t and \n in sublime for row and column respectively) and you get really powerful, really fast when it comes to converting information into a useable formats.

I've also made use of excel's data validations to create drop downs in cells for making hundreds of lines of complex config for a rules engine in a few hours. Enter the configuration in excel, export to csv, use a ruby to import csv into a database table via existing orm. (Why not use the UI? The app is too slow.)

I turned what would have been a week long data entry task into an afternoon of copying and pasting out of a another spreadsheet. (Why didn't I used the other spreadsheet? It was in a non-machine readable format. I had to convert the data to the proper format using my knowledge of the system internals.)