Excel is great until suddenly it's not. When I started building ProjectionLab, it began as an excel spreadsheet that (at first) was easy to share and explain to friends and family who wanted a better retirement plan. But as they asked for more flexibility and new features, it spiraled out of control into a complex web of advanced Excel features that became opaque and unmaintainable. No doubt Excel is powerful and feature-rich, but sometimes layering on more and more of those advanced features isn't the answer.
Would it be any different if you used a different tool and/or programmed everything manually?
In my experience, it would be 50x worse because Excel handles for you a lot of things that are extremely time consuming to code manually. (eg. error handling)
Basically on the long term the possibility to use real code that is easy to change and understand will save you incredible amounts of time. If you reach a point where your code is too complicated that you are afraid to change anything, you're basically stuck.
I guess it depends on what you mean by worse. In my case, I abandoned excel and rebuilt the tool as a web app using Vue.js, Chart.js, Firebase, etc., which is what ProjectionLab is now. More overall development work, but the end result is way better than a spreadsheet.
