[sterlinm]

Agreed about the similarities between Excel and Pandas. I started out as more of an data analyst and am now a SWE and I think one of the things that SWEs who dismiss Excel and Jupyter don't understand is how little you can assume about the data you might be working with.

If you're an analyst who knows some VBA, that can be super useful but it would probably be a mistake to try to make your VBA-driven applications bullet proof. Nobody wants you to spend that much time on it, and the odds that something completely out of your control will change and break it anyway are quite high.