[somewhereoutth]

However:

Excel is 'free-at-point-of-use', i.e. once you've paid for it, to use it doesn't cost anymore. But LLMs do cost per use (unless we all go to local models). Either this cost is billed directly, or some sort of bundling occurs with 'fair use' limits.

Excel is deterministic, yes scary spaghetti-fied spreadsheets are routinely constructed, but, for example, sorting a result column somewhere can be done with a bit of poking in the right place. LLMs have a tendency to dangerously change many things if the prompting is a bit wrong (and even if it is a bit right).