That's a shame, 95% of users are clearly missing out on the thrill of bending a MSFT product to their will, a rare occurrence in and of itself as well as never

That's a shame, 95% of users are clearly missing out on the thrill of bending a MSFT product to their will, a rare occurrence in and of itself as well as never needing to rely on someone else for data analysis/transformation for their own work. I worked at a hedge fund briefly (recently) and the rest of the investments/trading group literally didn't know what they were doing in terms of tooling/analysis/etc and that's a separate story lol (seriously - after the fund went from $30mm AUM to $1.2b before I joined, I immediately suggested hedging at least 50% of the portfolio with some puts 3 months out, and the 'founder' immediately said 'no but we are long') Anyways so yeah instead of advancing the field with my sexy python backend code, sadly I ended up being tasked with all of the new interim strategy, while also needing to find alpha. So while I was writing a core real time risk web app implementation in Python/C, along with a trading system based on some off the shelf tooling with some custom infra by yours truly, I was also tasked with creating a "temporary solution" that was just based on Google Sheets (The Firm™ decided to strategically adopt Google for everything, even though Sheets is garbage) - INDEX/MATCH don't work, and none of the advanced functions work. Of course, building the functionality into Google's little app is not scalable and probably won't even exist in another 3 years, but Excel is just so great if you have a super small dataset that you need to slice and dice for some quick analytics. Then I'd just port over the functionality to C and write some wrappers to facilitate quick computation in Jupyter Console. Really great reactive stuff. And with xlwings, I could do some quick analysis and then just rip that into my running session and then do whatever analytics I wanted to. Going on a huge tangent here, apologies. But Excel is great and it could be even better if they figure out a more efficient stream-based system to get rid of annoying hangs while you are processing a larger dataset, especially if there are many complex formulas embedded in the sheet (again, obviously this can be handled by constantly dumping the data and then re-performing analysis on the derived dataset without all the insane, nested Excel formulas across a bunch of cells). Pretty sure a minimal implementation of Excel with INDEX, MATCH, FILTER, ROWS, SEQUENCE ( & and maybe TRANSPOSE for good measure ) would be Turing complete. EDIT: This went super off-topic. I apologize, but basically moral of the story is... if your requirements are ambiguous, your friend Excel is there waiting to help. Just gotta know your tooling and learn all those weird functions you think you normally wouldn't reach for! EDIT2: Avoid computers if possible