>"I graduated from college with a degree in biology, and I spent hundreds or thousands of hours in Excel manipulating data and graphing...creating a graph with 254 series will probably take the better part of a week."
I don't see how this is an argument for using excel. You could have spent a small fraction of that time learning the basics of R and gotten everything afterwards done 10-100x faster. I know, because I used to be one of the people who spent insane amount of time on incredibly basic stuff. That said I still do sometimes use excel to inspect data and for some other simple tasks.
I wasn't arguing that one should use Excel. I wasn't arguing that you shouldn't use Excel either. I was arguing the exact same point you just made - you should use the appropriate tool for the job.
Excel is a great tool for manipulating data, especially if you are working with other people. Excel produces serviceable graphs, but if you need to produce a graph of any sort of complexity (and know how to program) R is certainly a better tool. Sometimes you need a quick visualization of some very simple data. I'd prefer to use Excel rather than R or Python at that point.
I don't see how this is an argument for using excel. You could have spent a small fraction of that time learning the basics of R and gotten everything afterwards done 10-100x faster. I know, because I used to be one of the people who spent insane amount of time on incredibly basic stuff. That said I still do sometimes use excel to inspect data and for some other simple tasks.