[ScottBurson]

Yes, exactly. What fools people is that programming in the small is indeed trivial, and so they think that all programming is trivial. What they don't understand is that as programs grow, their scale and complexity become barriers in themselves; and then managing that complexity becomes the critical factor for success. The reason they would be better off just writing code is that, well, for one thing they would be working in a language with better-defined semantics that wouldn't change out from under them, but beyond that they would be able to use some of the other tools that software engineers have found useful over the years: starting with simple things like well-chosen variable and function names and comments, all the way to version control, none of which is possible with Excel (AFAIK; I'm not an Excel user; but even if they're possible they don't seem to be standard practice).