At Uni, decades ago (and using Lotus-1-2-3 rather than Excel), we were given a set of spreadsheet templates for a business management exercise (the project ran much the duration of the course). I discovered looking at these that there was an error in the spreadsheet double-counting all inputs (rows and columns were added and the row-totals included in the grand total). Best I can tell, finding that bug was not in fact part of the course goal....

At an early gig doing analytics we hired an old fart who actually introduced some rigour to our project practices, including code walkthroughs. Some of this involved more obviously programmatic tools, but the process was also applied, over the strenuous objections of the analyst involved, to a project largely done in Excel. Numerous errors were found, and corrected. The spreadsheet was also significantly rationalised by having "dumb" data-entry area, and then relying on a sheet with VBA code rather than in-cell logic for the computations.

The analyst continued to object to the code review, after the errors were found and corrected, insisting that it was inappropriate because he "wasn't a programmer". (I looked him up recently, he's continuing to work on analytic projects, two decades on.)

This was also about the time that I first heard of Ray Panko, at the University of Hawaii, who'd found reliably that 88% of spreadsheets had errors. This still holds largely true.

http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/

I'm not saying "get rid of all Excel". But I am saying that the tool makes for very, very, very buggy processes, and this is itself a problem.

I'd love to see work toward alternatives that retain the flexibility and versatility of Excel (or other spreadsheets) but reduce the possibility of bugs and errors.