Good article, Steve. I don't see how to get around this one. Where I work there aren't a lot of people who even know how to open up Excel, let alone use it. However, our upper management does, and they write their own spreadsheets, develop their own formulas and I'm certain make some unknown amount of business decisions based upon them. And I've never seen the formulas they write, to verify if those formulas are valid or not. The power of Excel is both it's beauty and it's potential danger. If my boss can write her own calculates in Excel (she can) to do something trivial, then I'd rather she did it rather than wait for me to write an app to do it for her. However, you article does really give me pause - perhaps I should pay more attention to what she's calculating.

BTW, as an aside, thank you for writing about the "race to the bottom". I've never heard of that, but can definitely see that in action.