IMO, the first rule of Excel should be: never let it become part of any official processes. I love Excel for what it can do. I hate Excel for what people do wi

IMO, the first rule of Excel should be: never let it become part of any official processes. I love Excel for what it can do. I hate Excel for what people do with it. It's a true jack-of-all-trades application that often gets used when a more purpose-designed application would be a better fit. My department is constantly hampered by scaling issues because someone used Excel instead of a simple script, database, or a more automation-friendly file type. And most of my department is comprised of software engineers, so there isn't usually a good reason for those things to be consider inaccessible. Judging by the comments so far, it looks like we're not a lone.