[pyoung]

I have used VBA here and there, and try not to bag on it too much. There are some cases where using it can make sense, but in general, it seems to be a compromise.

I get a little confused about the programmer/non-programmer dichotomy. If you are capable of implementing a complex model in excel, you are probably more than capable of learning a programming language. If you are just tallying up a few numbers to throw into a report or presentation, then yeah, no need to switch. As I mentioned in another post, it probably has to do with exposure and motivation.

[boomzilla]

Excel is a tool, and it's a really good tool for what it does, which is for applications that require: - very fast iteration cycles - a particular data model: grid of numbers which is very common in business world - support for everything under the sun: persistence (just hit save :), dialog UI, math formula, stats models, string functions, date/time functions (better than even Java's Joda), internationalization, localization, utf 8, and plenty more