It is sometimes more possible to determine if your analysis is wrong in excel because you can look at the numbers and the numbers have meanings. It can be harder to debug things if you can’t see intermediate computations. I guess I would say that excel prevents some kinds of bad problems with faulty analyses but opens you up to other problems like overfitting or the cherry-picking you describe. But it also seems impossible to produce a reporting tool that both gives useful analyses and doesn’t do incorrect analyses.