It isn't so much Excel as it is spreadsheets in general. The cycle I've seen is that when a group starts out, they use Excel because it is a rapid tool that th

It isn't so much Excel as it is spreadsheets in general. The cycle I've seen is that when a group starts out, they use Excel because it is a rapid tool that they understand. But then they keep building on that until they have a very complicated mess on which they are dependent. Spreadsheets don't tend to have good tools for testing and can be very brittle, so they end up slowing things down and causing problems. There are some interesting case studies here: http://www.eusprig.org http://www.eusprig.org