It gets you pretty far. When I worked at a bank, most of the pricing was done in Excel. What they had was infrastructure on top of Excel, like standard calcul

It gets you pretty far. When I worked at a bank, most of the pricing was done in Excel. What they had was infrastructure on top of Excel, like standard calculations and network connectivity, to support this. (I ended up writing a monitoring system for this, which proved very interesting. Months were spent going back and forth with the networking vendor about how slow their thing was, but I added some simple time in -> time out monitoring and we found that the cause was actually the spreadsheet. That was a politically unpopular finding, but data is data.) Anyway, this is still "programming", of course. You have inputs, you transform them, and you get outputs. What Excel gives is the ability to see all the intermediate calculations update as you stitch things together, which is very different from the software engineer approach (where we think of all the inputs, and write tests to make sure a particular sub-module works, and then treat that as working forever). The software engineering approach lets us build very large systems reliably, but the spreadsheet approach lets you build simple things very quickly.