[starquake]

I'm a developer. People have often come to me with Excel sheets that were really slow because it was just too much for Excel. Almost all of the times IMHO a specific solution should have been developed for it. I'm curious to see if this makes it better or actually worse.

[mcdonje]

Conway's law. Unless those people have devs or data engineers embedded in their group, they're going to keep on with less than ideal solutions. Management will accept those inefficient solutions because they don't come with dev pricetags.

[pessimizer]

I don't doubt that you have, but in my experience the reason they're slow is because updates haven't been turned off while the macro was running, or naïve algorithmic choices (that a query planner might fix in the realm of normal programming, but python wouldn't help with.)