> However - it doesn't help you get from the final stage of "amazing feats of wonder that should never have been done in Excel" to "a real program in a sane environment". Many people who construct those amazing feats of wonder don't even realise that what they are doing IS programming.

And sometimes if they do realize it's programming, they use that as a reason to pass the buck to a developer. At my first job, I inherited a number of Excel "codebases" in this way.