I've used it recently as excel on steroids. As in, you have a lot of data and you want to make a 20 page .pdf report with lots of charts and nice page breaks.

I've used it recently as excel on steroids. As in, you have a lot of data and you want to make a 20 page .pdf report with lots of charts and nice page breaks. I did this by editing a python script in vim that did everything, and just %load it in ipython every time I changed it (only a few keystrokes - not instant but ok), but ipython's magic is putting all the matplotlib charts in a nice html package (you can also mix markdown/text/html), that I can then run nbconvert to html & print to pdf (with only a few hacks / frustration).