Microsoft Excel

Avantages

My daily activities are heavily dependent on MS Excel. I work with very large amount of data and following abilities of MS Excel helps me to complete my job timely and effectively:
1. Ability to present data visually by different types of graphs
2. Ability to summarize data using Pivot table and Pivot graph
3. Ability to collect data automatically from different websites using connections
4. Ability to automate different redundant activities using Macro and visual basic

Inconvénients

The things I don't like about MS Excel are:

1. Its very resource hungry. You need minimum 4gb of RAM for day to day activities and 8gb to 16gb of RAM for bigger spreadsheet with more than 200k rows of data.

2. Though the size of Spreadsheets is adequate for normal day to day use, it has a limitation of 1 million (1,048,576) rows and 16 thousand (16,348) columns. Sometimes this limitation forces me to divide my spreadsheets in 2 or 3 parts which is not optimal.

3. The learning curve of MS Excel is not very smooth specially for new users.

Avantages

The ease of use, amount of functions, possibility of things can be done, writing functions within functions, giving link to cells between sheets and other Excel files.
It's almost possible to create a database-like structure using VOOKUPs, HLOOKUPs, which result in "Join"s.
Functions have not only basic operations such as sums, dot products, but also return statistical parameters too. For instance, one time I needed the slope of an array (I actually work as a data scientist and use Excel, too) and there was a function for this. All I need to do was to point out the array and Excel fits a linear regression in background, giving me the slope of it as I needed.
Not only that but availability of VBA extends the functions of Excel even furthermore. For that reason I cannot imagine anything Excel cannot do that one would be able to do on paper and pen.

Inconvénients

As I explained above, I work as a data scientist and I sometimes deal with huge amount of data "BIG DATA". As much as I love working on Excel, unfortunately Excel sometimes cannot handle big data, especiaily if there are millions of rows. That's the only downside of Excel I can think of.

Avantages

Excel is one of the most powerful tools that is used daily in Fortune 500 corporations. From simple graphs and tables to complex VLOOKUP functions that I use daily, Excel can be used in home, offices, and schools. I find Excel extremely useful to store and manage data. Excel can handle every large data sets and is very intuitive to conduct simple data analysis and visualize it. I have been using Excel for more than eight years now, and I can vouch for the plethora of functionalities it provides to make our lives easier. From making Pivot Tables to conducting sensitivity analysis in my financial research models, Excel is a one-stop solution for quick modeling work. I have found that sometimes, it is much easier to transform and clean data in Excel rather than writing complex scripts in Python or MATLAB.

Inconvénients

Excel's way of indicating errors in your formulas aren't always helpful to figure out the exact source of error. Plus Excel doesn't have an inbuilt autocorrection to check for spelling errors. You must double-check the spellings in your Excel model/document before sharing it with anyone.

Avantages

I use Excel regularly - sometimes for its intended functions like calculations and personal business organization, as well as sometimes just an easy way to keep track of things visually by assigning it different colors and locations. Many of my calculations are quick-and-easy numbers where it's easier to make a quick plot on excel than type everything out on a calculator. Other times I've made very extensive sheets to organize a lot of data and perform calculations for special projects.

I find Excel useful for organizing and presenting data. There is a learning curve to understanding how to program it to perform different functions and calculations, but once you've gotten the hang of it then it is pretty easy to set things up to perform live calculations as you adjust your data. More advanced features include getting cells to change color based on the numbers or letters appearing in either that cell or others. Since I'm a very visual person, color coding is very helpful for me. And of course it is easy to convert your data into charts and graphs.

Inconvénients

When you type a formula incorrectly, excel's error messages aren't always very helpful in understanding what the error is. There is no way to exit out of the cell containing the error without either fixing it or deleting all the text inside and starting over later after you've figured out what you did wrong the first time.

Creating graphs and charts isn't always as intuitive as it could be. Sometimes I've had to struggle a bit to get the data I want to appear along the axis I want in the correct intervals. It would also be nice if the chart would automatically adopt whatever color coding I used in the data cells so that I wouldn't have to manually modify the default colors.

For some of the more advanced functions, the editor can get very clunky. For instance, I did a sheet once where I had it return a different string of text for whichever number in a range was entered. This quickly became a very unwieldy mass of code in a single cell that was difficult to edit in the small text box and caused some lag in the program.

It's also annoying that when using search, I am limited to searching one sheet at a time instead of the whole workbook. I'd like to see more options to customize the location and parameters of my search.

Avantages

Well, I would just say Everything, but to more specific, I really love to work in the Excel by using short keys, it helps you to speed your work. Then it would be the formulas and the most useful would be vlookup/hlookup. Those are the things which makes my life easier on a daily basis. I usually don't even open the calculator no matter how simple the calculation is, it will always be Excel.

Also I really love the Pivots and tables which are really cool, accurate and nice. Also everything can be customized in the exact way we wanted. Same time its very secure, you can protect the worksheet or the book. Having all these great features I use Excel even for any documentation needs instead of Word.

Inconvénients

Am just a normal user who used Excel at work and also for my personal analysis/documentation purposes. But I'm not an Excel pro who knows Macro and all that. Hence this software satisfies all my needs, so I cant think of any cons at the moment provided that I don't even get the maximum out of this amazing software.

The only issue I have here in Excel is there is no inbuilt auto correction or a grammar, spell checker. I know we can always use F7 for that but it would be great if it is possible to underline the missed spell words by the the time we are typing them.