I've used excel and python in lots of business contexts. For most tasks involving domain experts, excel usually wins hands down.
An excel spreadsheet is usually easily auditable. The visual presentation and layout lends itself to review by others. You can click and point at values. Python and other programming languages require an environment and tooling that can't be easily supported across the enterprise. It requires source control systems and code review.
Programming languages are also too "dynamic". Using excel I can bring in a hard-coded report and link to those values in another tab. In python I'll have to save those to another file or re-query the data source, which may have changed due to new values being retrospectively added.
Python is the right tool for lots of analysis tasks, but for most corporate reports it's hard to beat excel. Programmers are also more expensive than corporate analysts. So you would end up replacing teams of low-cost high-retention analysts with high-cost low-retention programmers.
how does Python require source control? I guess you can just drop your files on a sharedrive... just like ... EXCEL!
Also you reference an existing report? What's exactly the problem of serializing your data after a run of your python program? Actually, if you think this through, you would probably establish some pipeline architecture to just continously integrate your results.
> An excel spreadsheet is usually easily auditable. The visual presentation and layout lends itself to review by others.
Tell that the next poor soul who has to edit some organically grown spreadsheets powered by VBA and malformed CSV files which generate your company's financial reports.
> An excel spreadsheet is usually easily auditable.
What does this sentence mean? Virtually no part of excel is easily auditable, at best you can see "this file was changed by xyz at a:b:c" identifying the cells that have changed between versions wouldn't even be easy.
All versions of Excel from 2013 and onward come with a tool that lists out cell by cell differences between two spreadsheets, called Spreadsheet Compare [0].
It lists side-by-side differences in hardcoded values, formula changes, calculated value changes, and even changes in VBA code. The list of changes can then be dumped out to a text file.
Default Excel installations also include the Inquire add-in which allows you to perform the comparison within Excel itself.
An excel spreadsheet is usually easily auditable. The visual presentation and layout lends itself to review by others. You can click and point at values. Python and other programming languages require an environment and tooling that can't be easily supported across the enterprise. It requires source control systems and code review.
Programming languages are also too "dynamic". Using excel I can bring in a hard-coded report and link to those values in another tab. In python I'll have to save those to another file or re-query the data source, which may have changed due to new values being retrospectively added.
Python is the right tool for lots of analysis tasks, but for most corporate reports it's hard to beat excel. Programmers are also more expensive than corporate analysts. So you would end up replacing teams of low-cost high-retention analysts with high-cost low-retention programmers.