The backbone of many statistical institutions such as the Office for National Statistics is Excel. I worked on porting a lot of complex Excel systems to Python

The backbone of many statistical institutions such as the Office for National Statistics is Excel. I worked on porting a lot of complex Excel systems to Python that had been around for 5+ years. There were teams of people whose job it was to produce one report over a timeframe and they had the process to a fine art. The main problem came when members of said teams left. Macros locked behind passwords, magic numbers in formulas, the wheels could come off very fast. If Excel had a more robust functionality for versioning and documentation it could be even more of a powerhouse than it already is.