People doesn't realize that what they are doing in Excel is no other than the programming. If the task requires programming, it should better be handled by a programming language which support version controlling and debugging.
Maybe, but, even leaving aside the knowledge and comfort zones of the people doing the work, many of the people who do signficant Excel work are business-side staff who are prohibited access to programming tools by corporate IT policy, but allowed access to Excel.
True. But isn't it a bit too easy to just tell people to stop using Excel (which they won't do anyway) instead of giving them something to help them solve their problems _within_ the Excel/spreadsheet world?
Departments, journals and other institutions could crowdsource an Excel plugin to solve this. (Or at least to lint the spreadsheets.)