You could be right but I would like to put forward another possible reason. They could be telling the truth. I studied computer science late 90s and to this day I cannot use MS Excel beyond summing a column of numbers. To make matters worse I work in data engineering space. So people often assume I do not want to help them when I tell them I cannot help them with their fancy spreadsheets. I have never owned a Mac book and sometimes I get asked for help and I haven't a clue how to help. The answer is how come but you have been working with computers for all these years.
Ditto here. Word, Excel and clones, mostly at Wordpad level and a bit more in sheets. For the rest, I know awk/perl/tcl and Gnuplot. And md2Groff-> PDF does magic. PowerPoint? Magicpoint or sent(1).
IMHO, speaking from a data engineer perspective. Excel is used excessively by industry specialists who aren't in IT or but IT people who are being constrained by environment. As in they don't have a better tool to work in. It is a great tool to quickly mock up a report.
Why am I am not good at excel, it is because I am the person who tends to fetch the data from the different systems and consolidates it for the analysts to analyse and some do use Excel to analyse the data.
