I find with excel it takes just as much time to set up a spreadsheet to do what I want as it takes for me to do the same in R, usually a lot more time with Excel. Both pieces of software have learning curves, just to me R is the better tool for the job for working with tabular data. Excel forces you to hardcode your fomulas and ultimately adds a lot of cruft and time wasted, compared to R which is much more modular. That "min(A4, B1+C5)" is liable to break if your spreadsheet changes. R functions on the other hand are pretty well documented, and you could do anything you want in R after following a tutorial for a couple hours. Instead of having to hard code a position, you can refer to it relatively or by some unique identifier, so your calculations still work no matter how your underlying spreadsheet changes or is shuffled around (and familiar formulae like sum and min and max are there by the same names). It's way easier to do statistical tests and plot data consistently in R as well. Oh, and you can export to .csv or .xlsx from R if you'd like of course.