I agree with this. Excel is a wonderful product and I reach for it frequently when I need to get stuff done with some data. I tried to use OpenOffice and Apple Numbers and both are really poor by comparison.
Also, I've found that the combination of Perl and Unix command-line tools (cut, sort, uniq etc.) and Excel is really powerful. I can grind some data from log files or other sources into a format that Excel can read and then analyze it in Excel or get charts etc.
Excel and PowerPoint are the only Microsoft products I have on my Mac. Excel for its excellence and PowerPoint because I can exchange presentations with other people who use Powerpoint since none of the other presentation software really shares correctly with PowerPoint.
I had a similar experience, combining Excel (and VBA) with Perl and some other toolsets. I tend not to get too specific on here, but this allowed me to survive a major downsizing and extreme lack of budget while greatly improving accuracy and schedules, and to ride out a series of drastic changes to inputs that were "thrown over the wall" to my department. If I were to mention the dollar amounts being managed through those workbooks, people would shudder.
Excel has its cruft, and depending upon what you're doing you have to learn by experience some of its odder and dimmer (danker?) corners. But, that aside, IJFW. And quickly, and without choking.
That said, if you don't know what you're doing... Well, I had to "correct" a lot of people who assumed that because the machine showed them a number, it was right.
Excel will not enforce correct design, nor thinking.
Which reminds me of some crap dBASE programming I had to clean up, some years prior. And any number of other things.
It's not Excel. It's the people using it, and the people who assign them to use it without accounting for those people's limitations (and their own, apparently).
I have found mistakes in (other people's!) Excel spreadsheets that amounted to (real) 6 figure problems...
Then again a replacement system would probably cost about the same.
I was in a position where I did not have resources for anything else. (Yes, ironic, given the dollar amounts I was handling. But then, welcome to "big business"...)
And, with the changing shit raining down from on high, as well as the need to adapt processes for my own sake and survival, it ended up being for the best, anyway.
Within a limited value of "best". In retrospect, better would have been, ultimately, to be working somewhere else. (Though for a time, the relative autonomy and one very decent direct manager were rather nice.)
Some of the improvement I provided was correcting the outputs of a longstanding legacy system that routinely borked a "random" subset of its data. People had ostensibly looked and been unable to correct this in the original code, and at the time management felt it had no budget to work on this further, at the mainframe level.
So, I guess.... to some extent, it's not the system, it's what you do with it! Old, big dollar legacy project fucked up, and we ended up fixing it on the PC. LOL's aplenty.
Also, I've found that the combination of Perl and Unix command-line tools (cut, sort, uniq etc.) and Excel is really powerful. I can grind some data from log files or other sources into a format that Excel can read and then analyze it in Excel or get charts etc.
Excel and PowerPoint are the only Microsoft products I have on my Mac. Excel for its excellence and PowerPoint because I can exchange presentations with other people who use Powerpoint since none of the other presentation software really shares correctly with PowerPoint.