I almost think the spreadsheet part of the article is a red herring. It's being used as a literary device to tie together a few useful investigatory methods in a way that puts a bit too much emphasis on the tooling at the expense of the real advice, which is to profile the project and get a good sense of what you're working with before you move on to development.

To put it another way, if you were to boil this down to a one-liner to a colleague, "investigate before developing" is useful advice and "use spreadsheets" is not.