Yeah, I've always thought with the types of integration hooks you're talking about that Excel could serve as a front end for many enterprise/back office apps.

Yeah, I've always thought with the types of integration hooks you're talking about that Excel could serve as a front end for many enterprise/back office apps. My first heavy use of Excel was in a thermodynamics class in college. We modeled heat gradients for various HVAC systems with Excel. After that, I used it to calculate stresses and strains of different structures using each cell as a node in finite element analysis model.