This reminds me of Edward Tufte's criticisms of PowerPoint [1,2]. Both PowerPoint and Excel are widely abused, in part due to their flexibility and initial ease

This reminds me of Edward Tufte's criticisms of PowerPoint [1,2]. Both PowerPoint and Excel are widely abused, in part due to their flexibility and initial ease of use. However, in addition to problems caused by its users, there have also been problems resulting from design deficiencies in Excel: automatically and irreversibly converting strings representing gene names into dates [3], displaying some numbers incorrectly [4], and incorrectly evaluating some statistical procedures [5]. [1] http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB&topic_id=1 http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0... [2] http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html [3] http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/5/80 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/5/80 [4] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/09/26b.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/09/26b.html [5] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=635312 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=635312