Let's stipulate that excel gives you all the chart-formatting crap you need. Is that a reason to pull in a million rows, which is what GP is about? Surely a chart with a million things displayed is going to be awful, no matter how well formatted. A simple shell script could save these users hours of work, every time they touch this godawful sheet. Actual analytics tools would be even better.

Why would you do any of that when it opens up fine in Excel? A chart doesn't display a million things, it summarizes it. End users aren't going to be pumping stuff through shell scripts, and I personally am not in the business of writing office suite software. If people can get what they want, easily without my intervention by paying MS I am all for it. Also I don't want to support the sales department when my bash script streaming their stuff to Spark fails.

The truth is that Excel is easier to learn than programming. Call it 'graphical programming' if you will, but Microsoft did build a very powerful piece of software that performs fantastically great for many data tasks. And many many 3rd parties built extensions (data import, cleanup/statistics, formulas and logical programs) that Just Work.

I live mostly in a land of Unix pipes and vim, but I get it. Excel is a low-abstraction (everything is visualized!) graphical programming environment that the business world loves.

Excel is the most successful FP language.