Excel can be great in the right hands, your worst nightmare in the wrong hands.

Yes, it is no surprise that it costs money to build a data warehouse, or create more controlled processes when reporting results.

But when everyone top to bottom can use the same data source and logic to get to the same results, a couple of wonderful things happen.

With more eyes on the data, rules are tweaked, or incoming data gets cleaner.

Less time is spent questioning results, more time is spent top to bottom working towards improving them.

Business Rules need to be in formal processes, whether in Excel, or in a data warehouse.

Excel can be a great tool to prototype with, and is a user friendly way to work with data.

Many of the workbooks I created for the business led to expansion of measures and dimensions in the data warehouse.

Take a look at PowerPivot, then how it can be in a published workbook in SharePoint (control).

Then with SharePoint 2013, you can actually use this data model and enhance it.

So it does start bridging some gaps when used in certain ways.

I've been on both sides of the fence - Excel programmer, and BI Developer.

So I have had exposure so some of the best and worst that can happen in both worlds.