I’m glad for you and I am sure you have created a viable small to medium business model relying on microsoft excel. But “a 30 minute clerical exercise” is still what I consider hand holding. Granted anything with a gui, would by definition require human intervention.
Excel is just not my development environment of choice. It’s a fine stop gap measure. Look if I was hired to develop in it, I would do so gladly.
I’m probably just bitter because they blew Lotus 1-2-3 out of the water and never looked back. : )
But has not Lotus 1-2-3 come back in the guise of Open Office?
Do this - figure out all the high priced IT support that "hand holds" any application. And even with a dedicated system, there is still administrative time to do things such as changing reporting relationships, changing commission rates, etc. Excel solutions require no IT support, and far less administrative support because everything is custom developed. And changes are quicker that the time it takes to write the email to IT, who will tell you it will take 3 weeks to get a proposal.