I think spreatsheets (nowadays Excel and Google Docs) are a much underappreciated tool. I neither fully appreciate nor fully understand them myself, but I'm starting to see the potential. Accountants and other business people already know them well, but I don't think the average HN user realizes what they could do with them, even for personal use. I think they're useful for all things of tracking, from to do lists to even recording time spend. Combine that with some simple scripts that work with csv, and you have a powerful setup with little programming.
Excel is the ultimate REPL, and is ubiquitous on business workstations. Your "code" can literally run anywhere Excel exists (hence why you see complex worksheets and excel files built and copied around orgs).
Obligatory Joel Splosky "You Suck At Excel" link [1]. Mandatory viewing in my opinion!
Whatever you (justifiably) think of the guy, Martin Shkreli is insanely good with Excel. He uploaded quite a few videos of himself doing stock analysis. For example: https://youtu.be/jFSf5YhYQbw?t=211
I have a few decades of experience writing software, but I still aspire to one day be as good with my tools as he is with his.
I skipped through it and the only impressive stuff I saw is his APM with clicking, copying and reformatting. I also saw him copy and paste whole columns of values and then manually replacing some with new values, which is super error-prone. What should look at to understand your impressions?
I still prefer Excel to esoteric regular expressions in vim for parsing complex text to copy paste. For example extracting individual pieces of data from a bunch of log file lines or reformatting text into syntax valid in some programming language.
You can work up the correct syntax in the top cell with mid, left, right, etc. And then just copy down once you have it right and copy the resulting values to your editor.
There's also "text to columns" for parsing separated or fixed width text.
