Following the same analogy, I think Excel would be a rice cooker. You can do lots of things with it, like cooking rice, steaming vegetables, making soups, etc.

Following the same analogy, I think Excel would be a rice cooker. You can do lots of things with it, like cooking rice, steaming vegetables, making soups, etc. You're right that it's not a unitasker, but in contrast to CLI utilities, it's not meant to be composable. With CLI, each tool specializes in doing one thing well and composing with other tools to do more complicated things. Using CLI equates to making your rice, soups and steamed vegetables with a stove, pots, lids, and steam baskets. The benefit being that you can use each of those things for more than just making your rice, soups and steamed vegetables, specially when composed with other tools, things that the rice cooker isn't prepared to do. If you ever wish to fry some food, you can't with the rice cooker, but you can with the stove. You can compose it with a pot or a pan depending on your need.