Many zillions of years ago (OK about 23) I was taken on, fresh from the dole, by a factory that made pies (pasties, sausage rolls, pork pies etc (south west UK)) to do the whole IT thing. Anyway, apart from a few other handy skills I learned to bodge a pretty decent spreadsheet, building on experience starting with Super Calc.

I converted planning from Lotus 1-2-3 to MS Excel (for shame) and then with my smart Pentium 60 based machine, developed a nearly complete finite capacity planner for the factory - in Excel. The devil is of course in the detail but my labour plan and forecasts beat the planners most of the time - except at Easter and Christmas.

Today, I'm really not a developer 8) I grew up and became a sysadmin (oh and a managing director - but that's another story)