Adding to brudgers comment: Rather than "Excel dangerously overused", I feel that technology is generally overused in an undisciplined unmindful inefficient wa

Adding to brudgers comment: Rather than "Excel dangerously overused", I feel that technology is generally overused in an undisciplined unmindful inefficient way. Excel is often presented as the exemplary to such overuse. I think that's because people who are motivated to come up with a solution to their common or more pressing problems of the day will naturally reach for the immediately accessible tools, and the more familiar the tool the better. In the usual corporate environment, Excel is already available for use. Such people will be subjected to annual reviews that will not explicitly include any acquired or proven computer savviness. Instead they will be measured against the expectations of their job roles, which is likely not "applications developer". If they manage to create custom tools (via Excel or the many other manifestations of Microsoft Office) that have empirically demonstrated their worth to somehow become part of the production environment, then so much the better as far as the department or business is concerned (at least at first). These people are not looking to become programmers. And besides, corporate desktops have gotten tremendously locked down since the late 1990's. It would take a fair bit of effort to make a business case to allow for some other computing environment (or tool) to be put on a corporate device. Which means experimentation would have to be done at home on their own time. Has it been mentioned that these people are not looking to become programmers? We should put this sort of situation in perspective, and celebrate that there were and are folks willing to really learn a tool sufficiently as part of their problem solving in becoming more effective in their job roles. At some point of course the home-grown Excel-based solution will hit its limitations, which is where we as the truly expert computing professional types step in and get to work. If you really understand Excel and VBA and COM, you can really tease out quite a bit of the user story and business logic out the Excel "prototype" and come up with the more elegant solution. And we can do this because we should be well versed at using this sort of technology in a more disciplined mindful efficient way.