[flogic]

Managers love Excel. Some of them are really good with it. It's probably the wrong tool for their job, but it is a tool they know how to use. For managers it's the lingua franca of data manipulation. They view it the same way most of us view pipes and the Unix command line tools.

[bediger]

If you'd stopped at "Managers love Excel", I'd agree with you. Unlike the lucky duck up above, I've never seen a manager write a spreadsheet that included a single macro, active cell or calculation.

I've only seen managers use Excel to format columnar data, and then only because "Word" does such heinous things with text in the cells.