I used to (vehemently!) agree with this sentiment! Then, for a startup I worked for, I said "Enough is enough. I'm going to automate this report for you and it

I used to (vehemently!) agree with this sentiment! Then, for a startup I worked for, I said "Enough is enough. I'm going to automate this report for you and it will be so much better!" I was automating a 12-step Excel-macro-vlookup-pivot-table report. I was using python. And boy was it a pain. Have you ever tried implementing pivot-table functionality in python? Holy smokes. (You can use numpy, but seriously don't add that as a production dependency if you can help it. There is some pivot table library but it doesn't actually do all the things real pivot tables do.) First you filter on column A, then sort by column B, then vlookup, then pivot, then... oof. Shoot me now. And don't get me started on matplotlib. It is theoretically great, but doesn't work on OSX, which is what I was using as my dev machine. What a cluster. My point being that, in my limited experience, I really couldn't imagine a world where devs had to write tools to do things that Excel has been doing for decades! And without any intervention from the dev team too!