Excel can be a great prototyping tool. I'm a statistician/programmer, and yet, I sometimes like to explore some ideas quickly in excel. It has a reactivity that

Excel can be a great prototyping tool. I'm a statistician/programmer, and yet, I sometimes like to explore some ideas quickly in excel. It has a reactivity that many programming languages like... it's very nice to change a parameter and see an entire computational graph update and a chart change in real time. The optimizer is actually decent and allows you to fit a lot of models. Excel is actually really cool. BUT using excel for ANY business critical purpose is insanity. Some desks in some banks rely on crappy old buggy spreadsheets to track the p&l of some large transactions, it's horrible. Academics use excel models and have been bitten because the models they produce are very hard to audit and to check for bugs. So by all mean, use excel to play around with data if you would like to, and when you get a feeling of what you want, build a clean, well documented script with python tied to a database.