My career experience is along the data science / civic technology / transportation engineering & planning / open data. I’d posit that customers of “high-end pr

My career experience is along the data science / civic technology / transportation engineering & planning / open data. I’d posit that customers of “high-end project management financial reporting software sold to very large customers” is starting to get niche. Again, my point isn’t to say that these people don’t exist. My point is that “data wizard” increasingly means not Excel. Plenty of non-tech firms are happy to hire entry-level “data scientists” who write some SQL queries, gin up some reports with spiffy graphics, and bang together a dashboard in Shiny or Tableau. It used to be that this kind of basic reporting work was done almost exclusively with Excel. Even if Excel has exclusivity in some specific industries, Excel’s influence and utter dominance just isn’t what it used to be. Put another way, I’ve taught intro R / Python skills to enough undergrad and grad students in professional career tracks to see that the future for Excel looks weaker than its past.