I'm a data engineer and have previously worked on projects in a large and long running company where some important operational metric is calculated using lots and lots of spreadsheets tied together by a combination of formulas and macros. Sooner or,ore likely, later, they would stop being possible to maintain and run and my team would get called in to rebuild the business logic in a (non excel and code instead) data pipeline.
The resulting pipelines were always very simple, but the process of working through complex spreadsheets was always a special layer of Dante's hell that he didn't even dare writing about.
These weren't created because people sucked at excel (those people made very simple spreadsheets with a few calculated columns in) - they where made by people who where very skilled but didn't spot that they should stop.
All those bad spreadsheets cost hundreds of person hours to maintain, and ended up being finacially and emotionally expensive to untangle.
Analysts of the world: please ignore this video and continue sucking at excel.
The problem is, that you always start with a table just like in video, with 12 rows and simple functions.... coding everything for 12 rows is overkill.
Then you just add two more rows and one column. And 6 more rows and two more columns. And just two more formulas. And then you need just one minor thing, that can be done with a macro in five minutes.
Yes, companies such as Apple need specialized software to handle stuff, and there are solutions to handle this (eg. SAP, no matter how pain in the ass SAP is). But expecting Apple to use SAP when it was just the two Steves in a garage is stupid... and upgrading to SAP (or whatever other solution) is a thing you do, once the excell spreadsheet gets to an unmaintainable mess and not a second earlier.
The resulting pipelines were always very simple, but the process of working through complex spreadsheets was always a special layer of Dante's hell that he didn't even dare writing about.
These weren't created because people sucked at excel (those people made very simple spreadsheets with a few calculated columns in) - they where made by people who where very skilled but didn't spot that they should stop.
All those bad spreadsheets cost hundreds of person hours to maintain, and ended up being finacially and emotionally expensive to untangle.
Analysts of the world: please ignore this video and continue sucking at excel.