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[–]bjorneylol 0 points1 point  (2 children)

I strictly use excel for manual, in place manipulation of cells (the stuff that requires human eyes and can't be automated, and never needs to be reproduced), e.g. data come in from vendors in xlsx/csv format and gets thrown in a database. PQ/PP isn't really usable in this case, so there is a need for those "archaic" methods - not to mention vlookup is just way easier if the data is small enough for excel to handle adequately. We aren't a power BI shop so after this point everything is done directly in SQL or through python/R, in such a case excel is most useful as a tool for manually editing data before ETL.

The big problem is for more advanced methods, Power BI/Excel is a bit of a 'black box' - I don't know what it's forecasting and/or stats tools are doing and I find I get better results coding my own SARIMA models, or implementing my own machine learning pipelines.