My biggest problem with Excel as a "solution" is that document control is kind of an afterthought. You've got X number of people in your organisation and they each have these adhoc collections of Excel spreadsheets. Usually the devil is in the details and you'll have one person who has calculated gross revenue one way and another person who has done it another way. The two approaches are never reconciled, but their output will invariably be compared as if they are discussing apples and apples. I've seen so much analysis done that was really just garbage because nobody understands where the data came from and what it means.
It's not really fair to blame Excel -- it's a calculation tool. However your solution space needs to address this problem and I very, very rarely see it happen.
It’s absolutely fair to blame excel. It obfuscates the code in favor of displaying the calculated values - it’s designed to hide the code - which, along with a number of other design decisions, makes it really hard to build an error free spreadsheet beyond trivial sized cases.
Further, its design makes reproducible data practices difficult - in contrast to R or Python which do a lot to separate code from data - and let you re-run the same code on new/updated data. Python and R (and other non-spreadsheet tools) encourage practices that make keeping raw data pristine with work being done on copies of the data. In contrast, it’s really easy to make mistakes with Excel in ways you’ll never catch. Sorting within filtered columns is a good example. Did you add another column after creating the auto filter? Surprise, data in that column won’t sort with all the other data when you use re-sort one of the original columns. Just like that, poof, silent data corruption with no easy way of reverting if the error isn’t caught quickly.
I almost cracked the org-mode code. Almost. Used it for some sheets but now I only use it for my journalling. Hopefully it will keep the embers hot until I decide to pick it up for real again.
It's not really fair to blame Excel -- it's a calculation tool. However your solution space needs to address this problem and I very, very rarely see it happen.