I just mashed a bunch of database dumps together at work and I just simply couldn't have done it "properly." I did it in Excel, and it was a pain in the ass, but I got the right data out of it. There's no reason Excel *isn't* the right tool except that it isn't trying to be.

— 🎃Utterly dispassionate documentary hog slaughte🎃 (@gravislizard) October 15, 2019

Agreed. Excel is often not the right tool for the job, but a lot of the Excel hate is just snobbery against a tool that allows people to do something they otherwise could not.

Doing something in code often take 100x as long as just doing it in Excel, and even that is going to have bugs. Sure, if it needs to be reproducible code is the way to go, no question. But recognize that path is going to take at least two orders of magnitude longer. And, Jill from accounting is never going to spend all the time slogging through C# or R so that she can spend years learning something that she can already do in Excel in 10 minutes.