I have been in computer business for 15 years in various roles (sysadmin, developer, researcher), and I have never encountered someone using excel for something more advanced than for formatting tables, or as an ad-hoc database that could have been maintained in a text-file.

I had to do heavy data-processing and plotting and for that I used some perl scripts + gnuplot, got tiredof it, and went over to R eventually. 2D spreadsheet just didn't seem well-suited for doing statistical analyses over 5-dimensional datasets (not to mention that it produces UGLY plots).

I attempted to use spreadsheet for time-tracking, and found out that I would have better been served by a relational database, so I gave up on using excel for that too. For example, it's important to consistently name tasks, and I needed to find out unique task names in a given column across several sheets (I had one timesheet for each month). How do you make such "query" in a program that essentially evaluates independent cells and has little notion of relations between them?

So, what are spreadsheets useful for? Why do they have a bunch of mathematical stuff built into them when, AFAICT, people use them mostly as table formatters or bad substitutes for databases?