I spent 2 years at a major bank converting processes from Excel sheets to a database with a strong distributed processing platform around it. They were doing r

I spent 2 years at a major bank converting processes from Excel sheets to a database with a strong distributed processing platform around it. They were doing risk analysis of tens of billions of dollars in CDO swaps (hey, it was 2007, these things were like printing your own money). That's where I learned about how much you can abuse Excel. FTP CSV output to servers? No problem. Copy data out to custom XML and import it back? Sure. Shell out to command line quant programs to run simulations? Fuhgeddaboudit. So much abuse.