[noonespecial]

I've learned to love Excel. Despite the horribleness mentioned and the seemingly intractable mess people make when trying to codify business processes with it, its still the very best way I've found for the end user to tell me what they want the "real" program to do when I finally write it for them. It forces them to stop thinking about specs in a genie-in-a-lamp way and start thinking about how an actual machine might make it happen. They glimpse the programmer's world through a glass darkly.

[ianamartin]

So much this. People who can't be convinced to write out a spec in a way that's meaningful and unambiguous are often more than happy to take a spreadsheet that mirrors the database, write the formulas that generate the outputs they want and give that to me. Hours and hours of back-and-forth are eliminated when I can convince people to do things this way.