I dont understand why me as a developer is using MS excel? or excel at all. I live in a JS world and my data is always noSQL/JSON or for relational purposes some sort of SQL.
I would never export a DB to crunch numbers in excel for a plethora of reasons. And for any statistical insight i would hope the service itself you are using [because i know you're not reinventing the wheel here] would provide you with the correct numbers with graphs you would have never even considered, simple example google analytics etc
Developers develop different things. Some are crunching websites or GUIs all day long, but others sometimes have some numbers to crunch (at or after work), or things to prototype. So YMMV, but I maintain that it's better to check out good tools than not, because sometimes you discover new things to do after learning how they can be done.
> I would never export a DB to crunch numbers in excel for a plethora of reasons.
You wouldn't, but you might want to connect to one every now and then to test out some ideas.
> And for any statistical insight i would hope the service itself you are using [because i know you're not reinventing the wheel here] would provide you with the correct numbers with graphs you would have never even considered
A service you're using provides you with insights they want you to have, and their time and scope for creating new features is usually limited to the "minimum viable user". If that's the only thing you need then you're golden, but sometimes you need to ask questions or do something with data that isn't offered by the service.
What I'm trying to say is this: Excel is to tabular data what Unix scripting is to text. A convenient and powerful way to solve a lot of problems in a small fraction of time it would take to find an off the shelf solution or develop a marketable-quality product. You're a developer, so you probably don't need it all that much (though sometimes using a spreadsheet really is faster than writing a script). But non-developers do.
