Do not shutdown the global economy. Just maybe move to tools with less issues around process governance:

"The 7 Biggest Excel Mistakes of All Time"

https://www.teampay.co/insights/biggest-excel-mistakes-of-al...

"The financial fails and business risks of spreadsheets"

https://www.webexpenses.com/2020/10/financial-fails-business...

"Nightmare on spreadsheet: take Excel use seriously"

https://www.icaew.com/insights/viewpoints-on-the-news/2020/o...

"Excel – The Dirty Secret"

https://tax.thomsonreuters.co.uk/blog/excel-the-dirty-secret...

"8 Challenges When Using Excel For Accounting"

https://www.senacea.co.uk/post/excel-for-accounting-challeng...

As though mistakes wouldn’t happen with non-programmers working in R.

In R, you can use accepted methods of software development and engineering, such as version control, automated testing, CI/CD to catch mistakes and prevent them from causing harm. In Excel? Not really.

Do you think the average finance department employee is going to do that?

Especially those departments should do so and learn to do it. Financial departments are always the ones complaining about the cost of mistakes, compliance risks (of the monetary kind) and doing due diligence. Preventing the production of wrong figures in financial excel sheets ticks all those boxes. They should bloody well be doing it, but I'm also not holding my breath ;)

And there are massive bugs in programs that use these tools like the Linux kernel still.

Would not necessarily be a bad idea.

https://theconversation.com/economists-an-excel-error-and-th...

Not that this is Excel's fault, but researchers should definitely either seriously learn how to use computer stuff, or just don't.

A person can't drive on the highway without a license, the same rigor should be applied here, especially in academic circles.

This. Most finance people who live by Excel have ninja level skills with Excel. I have had to unpack logic from some excel sheets into webapps and they had so much sophisticated programming embedded into it. And it is so much easier intuitive to use Solver for linear equations in Excel than any web application.

Regarding the graphing ability , R may have more power but plotting the graphs in Excel is so much more WYSIWYG.

finance people who learn to program will outperform those who don't.

I believe that’s true. There still aren’t enough to go around and won’t be for a very long time.

Excel is the closest we’ve come as an industry to building a tool that enables non-programmers to program. If it disappeared tomorrow, as some arrogant posters apparently wish it would, tremendous value would be destroyed. Not just in terms of existing workflows but in terms of new workflows that would not be done in R but instead would be done by hand or not at all.

I’m a hobbyist programmer who has worked in various finance jobs and is now working in investment banking. I would love to use programming in finance but I have to say it’s come in handy very little.

Well, prolly not in IBD. But in Sales and Trading or at a lot of quant funds it is very common.