> anything more complicated I'd rather do in a proper programming language. Yes you can. Most people cannot or don't want to. Programming is just a skill used

> anything more complicated I'd rather do in a proper programming language. Yes you can. Most people cannot or don't want to. Programming is just a skill used to reach an end and if your job description doesn't require it, you skip it. Excel democratizes the data analysis better than any open source alternatives and programming languages. It is easier to use and relatively less buggy than all of the open source and proprietary alternatives. When one really needs programming, VBA is there and it provides a much shallower learning curve for the curious. From a corporate point of view MS Office has unmatched integration with Windows, Active Directory, Sharepoint, SQLServer and many other programs. A huge amount of financial, management and engineering software tightly integrates with Microsoft software to provide functionality like automatic BOM dumps to Excel and then integrating that with manufacturing, currency conversion. The developers of such software are pretty content with it, especially due to long-term backwards compatibility MS provides for their APIs for all their products.