Excel can be an amazing tool when automated. I am amazed that more companies don't train their employees on task automation (Excel or not).
A few years ago I had a situation while working on a circuit board design. The board used huge FPGA's with over a thousand pins each. Creating and managing the schematic and PCB symbols for these chips took days of agonizing work. I finally had enough and wrote a tool that used Excel for data entry and editing. After about a month of work we could take an FPGA from data sheet to EDA files inside of 30 minutes. The tool most-definitely paid for itself many times over as it saw use over several years.
That's the one thing that is outstanding about MS Office: The ability to automate across tools is fantastic.
A few years ago I had a situation while working on a circuit board design. The board used huge FPGA's with over a thousand pins each. Creating and managing the schematic and PCB symbols for these chips took days of agonizing work. I finally had enough and wrote a tool that used Excel for data entry and editing. After about a month of work we could take an FPGA from data sheet to EDA files inside of 30 minutes. The tool most-definitely paid for itself many times over as it saw use over several years.
That's the one thing that is outstanding about MS Office: The ability to automate across tools is fantastic.