This is why the business (intelligence/systems) analyst role was invented. If you have a business team that is making decisions based on data, you really need a dedicated person who is competent with databases, statistics, reporting, and visualization. Otherwise you will be doomed to drown in e-mails of Excel spreadsheets with manually copy-pasted data and broken formulas. This is how most businesses operate, and I'd go as far as to say it's a major reason why we have been in an economic recession.

It sounds like using Excel correctly is as a prototyping tool or a means of doing one-offs. If that's the case, then Excel is to a proper business intelligence system as shell scripting is to a real programming language. Each has their place.

Yes, I think that's a good way of putting it. I think it's data manipulation and reporting capabilities are excellent. In previous jobs where I used to work with a lot of data it was often easier just to output to Excel to allow the teams to manipulate and create whatever reports they needed.

Indeed. As a product manager at the company authoring the post, I frequently prototype a new report in this manner.