Good point.

For the past two years or so, I've been writing a lot of Perl scripts to help with some analysis of our project. Specifically, I have a lot of Perl scripts that can open and read Excel files and retrieve information, and compile that information into a new Excel file.

My supervisor came to me not too long ago and asked me to write a script which would go through a huge Excel file (on the order of 12MB) and do a quick parsing of the text. The primary problem with the file as it was hinged on the fact that there was a series of extra characters in each cell. I don't remember exactly what the characters were, but a simple Find/Replace from within Excel reduced the problem to triviality.

As much as I love writing Perl scripts, this was not a good case for one. And as soon as I mentioned the Find/Replace, my supervisor could have kicked himself. He just saw a problem that Perl would be able to fix, and didn't think of anything else. :)