The sheer number of everyday business use cases that can be solved quickly and efficiently with spreadsheets is pretty astounding. Of course, there comes a point when heavily-used spreadsheets become intricate behemoths on which core business functions are run, and then things can get bad in a hurry. The challenge many programmers face is thinking that every business problem is best solved with code, when in reality the majority are solved faster, more efficiently, and more maintainably with a spreadsheet. Then the rest are worth developing "real" solutions for.
one of my first 'real' programming tasks involved replacing excel sheet with simple application.
Bcause excel sheet was doing a lookup in HUGE(i am talking about few million rows of raw data) dataset - basically a fulltext search in a database with unstructured address data.
The idea was to fuzzy join two datasets, and to make manual joining a bit easier with search functionality.
It worked fine on dev's machine, but on user's toasters it took an hour to load.
> The challenge many programmers face is thinking that every business problem is best solved with code, when in reality the majority are solved faster, more efficiently, and more maintainably with a spreadsheet.
It's not like you can't do both. Excel supported VBA macros for a long time. Now it supports JavaScript.
It still supports VBA. I've seen multiple manufacturing facilities which are absolutely reliant on VBA macros to be able to produce and ship their products.
