Microsoft Excel is a very robust thinking engine, but no one ever said it was pretty. It can be somewhat difficult to use Excel to get the visual effect you might be looking for, and thus, it suffers somewhat as a reporting tool.
Data’s great and all, but unless it’s organized into something meaningful, it has a hard time communicating anything. What’s more, it lacks features we now find critical, like live-updating, file sharing, and integration with other apps.
