Excel (or LibreOffice Calc) is best suited for bottom-level data entry and not much else. It's just so much easier to use Python and pandas when it comes to ma

Excel (or LibreOffice Calc) is best suited for bottom-level data entry and not much else. It's just so much easier to use Python and pandas when it comes to managing large numbers of spreadsheet files, merging files or extracting data, transferring the data into a relational database like sqlite, and running various analysis on the data. Well-commented Python scripts are far easier to comprehend than opaque cell formula entries. The level of knowledge required isn't that prohibitive; nobody using Python in this manner needs to be a computer guru who understands Python C extensions, etc. Pandas is pretty straightforward, and interfaces easily with Numpy for data analysis. It doesn't even have to be Python, R provides similar functionality (but those do seem to the most common and easiest-to-use high-level data analysis languages). This is such common knowledge that the absence of any mention of it from this WSJ article is itself peculiar, and makes one wonder if this is some coordinated marketing exercise on behalf of Microsoft.