As a mechanical engineer, excel has been a wonderful tool.  Engineers in our department get to have a smooth transition into programming competency in VBA, which has found itself extremely useful in many mechanical engineering analyses.<p>My coworkers are given the ability to crawl (simple equations in spreadsheets) then walk (user-defined functions) then run (automatic iterative solutions in UDF&#x27;s, applying test data to create UDF models of machine performance).  Not something a lot of mechanical folks would ever find themselves doing unless an already well-used tool has a good progression toward more complex and demanding use cases.