For me, Excel is a tool mostly for entering data manually. In the case you described, it would be good for that purpose. I suppose you would have a column for each volunteer and then just enter data. Then you can read the file with python (pandas) and make a sum over the columns and give the one with most hours. Of course this case is also easy to do in Excel, however, the idea is that if you know more powerful tools (programming in general), then you will be able to do other things that otherwise you would regard as more time-consuming. Maybe you want then to give different awards for age ranges. And if you have too many volunteers then it would not be so easy any more in Excel, but in python you would just know how to do it.