Excel is superb for automating/number crunching short lived business processes or those that are one offs or change rapidly. Especially if you don't have technical resources available to do it any other way.

The biggest issue they had was not understanding that the data from one area (Wales) was in a different format from the others - an integer that represented rank (lowest being best) rather than a test score - that would probably still not been noticed if they'd used something else.