I have some objections, as someone who doesn't use R but does quite a lot of Excel. The author seems to miss PowerQuery, data model, and PowerPivot functions.

I have some objections, as someone who doesn't use R but does quite a lot of Excel. The author seems to miss PowerQuery, data model, and PowerPivot functions. "Visibility: How do you see the code inside an Excel document? How do you tell exactly what is going on? You have to go clicking through cells, or reverse engineer what settings a graph has." PowerQuery it's a functional way of transforming data step after step. You can see the code/function of each step and it's very easy to reason about those functions. You can transform data to the format you want, and do calculations on it before it enters the spreadsheet. One of the main advantages is that it's easy! I've taught non programmers to reliably use this tool. "Repeatability: [...] With R, you just change read.csv("1.csv") to read.csv("2.csv") and the exact same calculations are run on two different data sets." Again, with PowerQuery this is doable, and a normal procedure on my day to day. You change the file parameter PowerQuery will use on step 1, and the rest of steps will follow. "Batch processing: Related to the above, you can read every CSV in a directory and produce a graph for each of them. You can read data from an API and run the same process on it that you did yesterday." You can use PowerQuery on folders, it can take a set of files and transform or aggregate them all at once. In my opinion Excel has gotten pretty powerful after data model and powerquery were added, I think around excel 2013. I barely use cell functions anymore; data model and pivot tables make for robust spreadsheets that are easy to reason about. I know a decent programmer can do most of it in many other ways, but the accessibility of Excel is amazing. The biggest defect Excel has for me at the moment is control change tracking. Wish I could git Excel changes.