I think it depends on what you intend for it to be used for. The reductionist view of it is that it's a workspace for crunching numbers. But in practice, Excel

I think it depends on what you intend for it to be used for. The reductionist view of it is that it's a workspace for crunching numbers. But in practice, Excel is sometimes used like a frontend for a database engine, with sometimes heavy scripting to integrate into software processes and workflows. I think Excel's ability to stretch beyond what anybody would still reasonably consider the scope of "spreadsheet software" is why Excel is as entrenched as it is. I don't think many programmers see it as a safe or ideal way of handling the kinds of workloads that people use it for, but I think we all acknowledge its unmatched ability to let non-programmers automate data crunching.