I have very mixed feelings about Excel, having been using it intensively over the last year where I never did before. It has a large number of components with overlapping functionality, apparently designed by separate teams at different times, all missing crucial functionality when I want to make some sort of BI type of solution. You have DAX, you have VBA, you have Power Query, you have the Data Model. And every new area I delve into, after I use it for a few hours, starts giving me weird errors and possibly corrupting my file. The latest is a dialog with a button that says "Send a Frown".
Quote from someone that is not me and not my particular issue, but that expresses the sort of problems endemic to Excel and MS software in general:
"When data is refreshed, I get a message box "Send a Frown" at unpredictable, inconsistent intervals. For example, it will work seamlessly for five or six times then suddenly it will fail, and give this "Send a frown" message.
A normal VBA error handler does not deal with this "Send a frown" message. Not even an "On Error Resume next" deals with it. I can thus not capture or step-over the error (err) and deal with it in my code. When the "Send a frown" message appears, the entire process is on hold until I (the human) clicks on "Send a frown" or "Cancel". This is problematic since this process runs 3am in the morning on our servers for about 200 connection refreshes."