If you can't get excel to do what you want then you are pretty stupid. I find it to be a useful tool. I use it at work a lot, but I could even see uses for it at home. For instance, I could put a bunch of recipes in excel and use formulas to have the ingredient amounts change depending on how many servings I wish to make. I could pretty easily do this on the spot, but being able to change one field in a spreadsheet and have all of the numbers adjusted for me right then would be fairly useful. I have also used excel to track my grades in college courses. It's great for determining what you need to do from any given point to reach a goal. I can calculate what grade I have to get on an exam to make my final grade an A, for example.