The excel work I've seen finance gurus perform is absolutely programming. There's usually "that guy" who assembled it and understands how the massive 100 tab completely uncommented spaghetti mess works.
And then he retires or gets run over by a bus and I have to spend three months reverse engineering it only to find that it is really just an over complex UI hiding a bug ridden home made database management system. Which I then reimplement in SQL Server and C#/VB.Net in a week; and the new version is faster, properly multi-user, more reliable, and actually maintainable.
Nah thats when you hire a consultant to support the spreadsheet at twice the rate. You can even pay them to make a new spreadsheet and train the next unsuspecting victim.
That's in fact what I was hired to do. I told them the first day on the job that they really needed a database, even sketched the schema. But they were adamant that it had to be an Excel solution so I wasted three months trying to untangle the crap that was there all the while trying to persuade them that a DB and a simpler front end would be much better. Eventually they agreed.