Many power users of excel do use more capable, testable and readable solutions. But they also use excel. Programming sucks in many ways that excel does not. Exc

Many power users of excel do use more capable, testable and readable solutions. But they also use excel. Programming sucks in many ways that excel does not. Excel is incredibly flexible and adaptable. If you need to treat one row differently as a special case that is easy in excel but can be a lot of work with programming, both for technical reasons (you need to handle the special case with special code) and for silly reasons (in excel you click the row which is special; in a program you must describe how to find the row.) Certainly there is an argument that one shouldn’t have such special cases as they make maintainability a nightmare but sometimes it matters a lot more to have something now rather than something later. In excel, the data is the most important thing and in the real world it often is too. In a program, the data (especially the intermediate data) is quite invisible. Power users may spot errors because intermediate values look wrong, rather than by carefully reading the formulas. Though if the values look right or there are a lot of them, errors may not be spotted. Excel is very ad-hoc which is the problem people complain about but also it’s power in dealing with the changing real world and anything exploratory. Once it is working and stable in excel, it is more wise to do it in python.