Mar 3, 2015: Excel and OpenOffice / LibreOffice Calc are the greatest, most powerful, and most important software applications of all time. Many in the industry will have no doubt about it. It provides enormous capacity to do quantitative analysis, letting you do anything from statistical analyses of databases with hundreds of thousands of records to complex estimation tools with user-friendly front ends.

And unlike traditional statistical programs, it provides an intuitive interface that lets you see what happens to the data as you process them. Excel is everywhere you look in the business world—especially in areas where people are adding up numbers a lot, like marketing, business development, sales, and, yes, finance. Extracting data from back-end systems and shoving it around in Excel spread sheets.