[unholyalliance]

To use the old saying, when all you have is a hammer, everthing begins to look like a nail. To most office workers, Excel is their hammer. You can stretch it to extreme limits by using things like pivot tables, and complicated lookup functions. It's easier for them this way, that is to say they have fluency in excel, but none in programming, which means they fail to realize that a simple well written script could save them from every having to repeat a task.

[LyndsySimon]

Excel is extremely powerful for data analysis, and is getting more powerful still as new versions are released.

If a dataset is under 200k or so rows, I'll generally do analysis in Excel. Larger than that, and I'm turning to Python.

Even then, the end result has be be passed to someone who isn't an analyst/developer, so where does it go? You guessed it: into an Excel spreadsheet, formatted nice and neat, and sent up the chain.

[michaelochurch]

This is a great point. Excel is a great tool, but it's the Blub of non-technical business people.