I've been an avid MS hater since the late 1980s, but I absolutely and unironically believe Excel is excellent software. It's the bright spot in a pretty problematic portfolio. Other Office apps have flirted with greatness -- DOS-era Word 5.0 was groundbreaking, for example; Access had a pretty great moment in the sun 30 years ago -- but no other consumer package from Redmond is on par with Excel.
I'm sure there are many orgs that would love to ditch O365 for Libre or Google, but can't simply because there is no real alternative at this point. Excel is too entrenched.
Excel can take people from fairly naive "help me make a table of numbers" tasks all the way to actual programming. Via PowerQuery, Excel gives end users access to data warehouses directly. Sure, a tiny bit of SQL is helpful here, but it's not required. I've written no end of data sanitization / transformation tools using Excel. Sure, I would have RATHER done it in Perl or Python, but Excel can be assumed to be present on the target user desktops; not so with Perl.
It would be cool if there was a better off-ramp for advanced Excel users into more focused tools appropriate to their domains (e.g., R, or Tableau/PowerBI), but if these folks are solving their problems who are we to push?
I'm sure there are many orgs that would love to ditch O365 for Libre or Google, but can't simply because there is no real alternative at this point. Excel is too entrenched.
Excel can take people from fairly naive "help me make a table of numbers" tasks all the way to actual programming. Via PowerQuery, Excel gives end users access to data warehouses directly. Sure, a tiny bit of SQL is helpful here, but it's not required. I've written no end of data sanitization / transformation tools using Excel. Sure, I would have RATHER done it in Perl or Python, but Excel can be assumed to be present on the target user desktops; not so with Perl.
It would be cool if there was a better off-ramp for advanced Excel users into more focused tools appropriate to their domains (e.g., R, or Tableau/PowerBI), but if these folks are solving their problems who are we to push?