I'm a professional software developer and I open excel every day.
Let's say someone emails me a list of figures and I want to quickly add them up?
Sure, I could write an incantation in awk but I can't then see if it's wrong because maybe on one row they 'accidentally' put an extra blank column in before the number by marking it with a letter, or there being an extra tab or whatever might cause that.
It's far quicker and less error prone to pop open excel, paste it in and then sum the column, and most importantly there is clear visual feedback if that doesn't work. In awk or a programming environment you'd just either get an incorrect figure and never know it was incorrect, or you'd get an error (e.g. trying to add a letter and number) and then have to debug what should have been an instant thing.
I'm a professional software developer and I open excel every day.
Let's say someone emails me a list of figures and I want to quickly add them up?
Sure, I could write an incantation in awk but I can't then see if it's wrong because maybe on one row they 'accidentally' put an extra blank column in before the number by marking it with a letter, or there being an extra tab or whatever might cause that.
It's far quicker and less error prone to pop open excel, paste it in and then sum the column, and most importantly there is clear visual feedback if that doesn't work. In awk or a programming environment you'd just either get an incorrect figure and never know it was incorrect, or you'd get an error (e.g. trying to add a letter and number) and then have to debug what should have been an instant thing.
Excel shines for doing one-shot data processing.