not op, The long story short is that a lot of data analysis that would normally require days of development can be done with a few clicks in excel. Would you get a better result if a team of 7 people spent en entire week working on it? Yes. Can a normal competant accountant get 99% of the way there by spending 2 hours in Excel, also yes.

Excel takes care of a lot of things that are a massive pain in the ass the deal with with any other solutions. It starts witht he ability to import data with a simple ctrl-c + ctrl-v instead of having to write code, but it doesn't end there.