I can vouch for this. I thought spreadsheets where stupid and useless until I was forced to use them by my boss at the CS department here for grading. I didn't

I can vouch for this. I thought spreadsheets where stupid and useless until I was forced to use them by my boss at the CS department here for grading. I didn't realize how easy having your computation and data being in the same place. It makes it slow, but usually for these sorts of things you want your data to be available on the scale of days, not nanoseconds so it works out. We have a complicated grading sheet here that manages all of the students information all one the same sheet in a google drive. Grades, attendance, recitation attendance, and at the end of the class homework. It also verifies the test answers against the correct ones to make sure we score exams correctly. Excel is great for fixed sets of data that need simple map/reductions & input verification because that's all we really use it for. After that move to something like Python&Numpy/R/Julia/Matlab.