Excel is a great tool, but it has its shortcomings. The article is highlighting the main one: it's easy to build huge, brittle systems with Excel.

This immediately brings up questions: What tools exist for building robust spreadsheets? How can we encourage people to use them? Should we make better ones?

This. It's important to remember that from the perspective of millions of corporate users (not the hacker crowd), this is is THE tool. When you think about it, Microsoft really is Excel. That is their core. Why is it difficult for corporations to switch from Windows? Office. Why Office? Excel. If anyone attempted to create something that not only matched Excel (with all the messy file compatibility issues and macros), but surpassed it, they would be striking at the heart of Microsoft.

Agreed. Although you could replace 'Excel' with 'Word' and still be just as correct.

Word isn´t the problem... Converting from Word to something else is some pain for users. Converting from Excel (especially Excel Macros) to something else is in the Millions of $ for developers/re-engineering of those Macros...

> MS Excel is a masterpiece in software engineering, definitely the best piece of software MS ever created.

Won't comment on the "masterpiece" thing, but I like SQL Server better. Only their Natural keyboard and mice are better than SQL Server.

> Large pieces of the economy run on Excel, finance, controlling, etc. are unthinkable without it.

Now, that's scary.

You are thinking on a whole different level than this article is trying to think about. "Can't see the forest for the trees" if you will.