One major drawback of using spreadsheets is that it is harder to spot calculation mistakes. A famous/infamous recent example is the Reinhart and Rogoff incident in 2013, which involved their heavily cited paper "Growth in a time of debt". When a research student named Thomas Herndon tried to replicate the paper's findings, he found, after a careful inspection of the Excel spreadsheet the two Harvard professors used, that the spreadsheet was ridden with errors. Some of them were even in principle rather trivial, such as mistaking the sum of one column as the sum of another. The incident was widely reported in many business newspapers. Paul Krugman had also commented on it on New York Times.
Had the steps of computations been written as a program, it might be easier for the authors to discover their mistakes. With a spreadsheet, if you put formulae inside data cells, you need to click all these cells one by one to see if the formulae have been input correctly. This is tedious.
>With a spreadsheet, if you put formulae inside data cells, you need to click all these cells one by one to see if the formulae have been input correctly. This is tedious.
Not really-really, you can choose to show formulas in settings. (reading them without making a mess of the formatting/size of cells is another thing, but you can always make a copy and inspect formulas there, "ruining" the formatting).
It is still tedious, actually very tedious, but as tedious as reviewing source code.
Had the steps of computations been written as a program, it might be easier for the authors to discover their mistakes. With a spreadsheet, if you put formulae inside data cells, you need to click all these cells one by one to see if the formulae have been input correctly. This is tedious.