Agreed. It could be because some companies don't want to pay for the Professional version of Office, so users are stuck with Excel. You do need to be an IT person or a power-type User with some programming experience to begin to write and debug VBA. I've run into some power users that have done some impressive things with Excel. Here is a $37 position sizing tool (Prosizer) written entirely in Excel. I think the author (Alex Matulich) did an excellent job. http://unicorn.us.com/trading/prosizer.html
I have also seen great examples of Excel "applications" ....but its a pity to have addins for Excel to connect to various Fincancial provides and not for Access.
Let me share a practical use of Excel VBA. I run a screen(also known as exploration in Amibroker) and calculate gain or loss between current vs previous close price. I export the result to Excel and use VBA to tabulate the results by Industry - max gain, max loss, number of winner and loser. Use Excel filter to screen out those Industry with winner > loser. I have 77 out 212 Industry met this condition. I can focus on 77 instead of 212.
It will save time to do all of that in Python and Pandas. You wouldn't need to rely on two commercial products and you could do it fully automated and with a faster execution time (largely irrelevant here).
I flip through 4000+ charts for each trading day and have a sense of market perspective. Amibroker is ok for the job. It's an old school approach. Excel wouldn't cut it for larger scale so I use perl. Of course, I could recode 6000+ lines of perl code to Python. But learning a new programming language would take too much time off my trading time.
Makes sense. I also used perl for everything previously but perl code becomes unreadable for any large project, so I converted it all to Python. But I understand why you'd focus more on productivity.
In support of d08, Howard Bandy has written excellent books on trading using Amibroker. He now advocates moving to machine learning and Python. In his 2015 book, Quantitative Technical Analysis, he shows an example of a system written for Amibroker migrated to Python.
So many great replies. Unsurprisingly - some discussion and disagreements as well. I'm not qualified to engage in that one, so I'll stay on the sidelines there. Thanks, guys!