This article isn’t new, although it seems to have some pretty current info (about Excel 2007, for example).  Worth a read for anyone who uses spreadsheets for everything, but doesn’t want to touch a database, Mathematica / Maple / Maxima / Octave / Matlab or R / S / S+ etc.

http://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/spreadsheet_addiction.html

And yes, I use R, Maxima, Octave, MySQL, Access as well as Excel. Right tool for the job, son.