[noxToken]

> horrifying and error-prone programming model, both hard to write and hard to reason about.

I don't remember where I read this, but I heard that the basic Office Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) is written with office workers in mind first. That is, Word isn't written for authors, Excel isn't written for database managers/big data specialists, and PowerPoint isn't written for motivational speakers.

I think the idea of the basic Office Suite is that a user could grasp the basic functionality of the software without having to undergo any training. Second to that, tools and other functionality for those with specific needs (e.g. pseudo-database functionality, basic data visualization in Excel) could use the software where the project was small enough. Excel was given great programming features without a proper programming language to support it.

This isn't to say that these programs are not feature packed or bad. They're kitchen sinks that want to make everyone happy.

[collyw]

The problem is that they are too easy to use. As such Excel gets used for everything data related. Access would be a far better choice in many of the cases I have seen, but it just doesn't make any sense unless you have had some sort of introductory course on databases.