Comment by roundsquare

Its fairly common for programmers to dislike excel (at least in my experience). However, it provides a lot of benefits:

1) Its actually pretty powerful. Since the cells update in real time it provides a nice way to do "what if" analysis pretty quickly.

2) The solver is pretty good.

3) Most people in business can read excel so it provides a good common ground.

4) Since all the intermediate steps in a calculation are in a cell somewhere, its pretty easy to trace through logic.

I certainly wouldn't use excel to handle huge amounts of data, but its a good tool as long as your computational requirements aren't that big.