I worked at a mid-size startup where all of the customer-facing people were ex-finance---I was consistently amazed by the stuff they did in Excel using just piv

I worked at a mid-size startup where all of the customer-facing people were ex-finance---I was consistently amazed by the stuff they did in Excel using just pivot tables, rudimentary graphing, and (VBA? I don't think you could use Python at the time) scripts to do data cleaning, ad-hoc CRM, even rudimentary procedural generation of web content. 90% were one-offs, so it was totally appropriate to not throw developers at the problems (recurring things eventually got built out as microservices). The main downside was that the functions and transformations weren't sharable across documents, and often there ended up being several mildly tweaked versions of the same functions across a bunch of documents. But I think I learned something about human tool use: when motivated, people will find a way to use the general purpose tools they know to improve individual efficiency.