Once I heard from a colleague that Excel was "a necessary evil in companies." When I asked why he said that, he mentioned that, unfortunately, many people hesitate to perform their analyses in dedicated systems and prefer to use Excel - especially because Excel is a very versatile tool.
At that time, Excel still offered few tools for data analysis, if I’m not mistaken, the “Data Analysis” option and the Solver Add-in.
You have certainly heard the phrase: "Still doing this in Excel?" or even, "You have a Ferrari in hand (referring, for example, to an APS system – Advanced Planning and Scheduling) but you are using a Beetle (referring to Excel)."
But currently, can we say that Excel is that limited? After Microsoft’s partnership with Anaconda (an open-source distributor of Python) in 2023, we can say NO. Route optimization (a core functionality of a TMS) or demand forecasting and resource optimization (core functionalities of an APS) are now easily executed in Excel.
In the video below, I show the step-by-step process for creating a simple tool for demand forecasting (using the SARIMA model) and a route optimizer based on the vehicle routing problem (VRP).
The scripts in Python and Jupyter are public and available on my Github:
https://github.com/Ldsantos1/Python-in-Excel