>I've learned plenty of programming tools and I recoil in disgust at the sight of them As do I. >Spreadsheets are pretty much the best tool out there for expl

>I've learned plenty of programming tools and I recoil in disgust at the sight of them As do I. >Spreadsheets are pretty much the best tool out there for exploratory work with numbers. That's an ideal use of a spreadsheet. A non-ideal use would be, say, re-inventing the RDBMS in Excel (perhaps the most common one, but there are far worse sins). >Personally, I'm in a process of learning Excel in depth I would, but I don't have the time. As I've said: with the sort of data analysis I'm doing (very little), AWK works well enough.