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Excel is incredibly useful and powerful. This type of comment screams "I've never used Excel a day in my life for anything other than creating a table." It can handle very complex formulas, that are easy to follow, and the data manipulation and efficiency is amazing. Your argument for moving away from Excel is the same as those who don't develop and say everything should be done through a WYSIWG editor.

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I've been around since Lotus 1.0, and worked in financial and engineering firms. I've seen cases where spreadsheets have been the right answer for knowledgeable and relativity sophisticated users, either to build a quick model or as a front-end, and cases where the result is an unauditable mess. Lots of oops when say accounting people don't understand say the math of partial-period NPVs, or are so innumerate that an obviously wrong result looks fine to them. Without the review process that should go along with production code, sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you don't. It all comes down to who is using the tool, I guess.

Excel use should have an inverse relationship with complexity. Just because you can make Excel handle complex formulas doesn't mean you should, or that's it's the right tool for the job.

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