No one has yet mentioned the shortcut keys, so I'll add this dimension.
When you show up to work on wall street, your new buddies will yank the mouse out of your machine and remove the F1 key. Then you can begin your apprenticeship with a fresh perspective.
The point is, you can be incredibly productive in excel against a very large problem space. It can't handle GB datasets, but once you have filtered down to a manageable size you can answer questions via ad-hoc analysis, automate financial reporting documents, solve multivariable regressions, run machine learning algorithms (see 'Data Smart') etc. with aplomb. I understand the objections to the data model and its inappropriate uses, but excel can take raw data from disparate sources to finished documentation for regulatory requirements and helps you automate most of that -- I don't think the finance industry is going to move away from it. I certainly don't perceive an understanding of the costs involved with building a different way.
>“I don’t want financial planning people spending their time importing and exporting and manipulating data, I want them to focus on what is the data telling us,” Mr. Garrett said
I hear this complaint all the time from business leadership, Mr. Garrett doesn't seem to understand that extracting/munging/preprocessing and then analyzing data is inextricable from the end product which is visibility and understanding at the business leader level. There isn't a follow-up to say Mr. Garret is hiring data engineers and software developers to serve the now-liberated 'data focusers'. I'm very skeptical that these sentiments are different than the past, or are a signal of changing times ahead.
Lastly, I'd to share the following funny snippet from the reprehensible though satirical leveraged sellout blog:
>I turned and tapped Josh on the shoulder to get his attention. I didn’t say a word, but my face said “Yo…yeah you, McKposer.” We locked eyes. I slowly and dramatically reached for my mouse cable. Staring him down, I methodically unplugged it from my computer’s USB port. The cable came out slowly but smoothly and with it’s final, climactic release, I heard Josh gulp with fear.
>I continued to glare at him as I started to “fly around.” My eyeballs burned through his unweathered, 60-hour-a-week-when-he-should-have-done-90 face as I hid and unhid sheets and conditionally formatted and applied validation to cells with triple nested conditional and indirect functions and then culminated by on-the-fly writing a macro that took my data and made it into a Marimekko (and we don’t even use that shit!). I never turned to look at the screen, and my eyes never left his.