I agree with this one. People who don't know how to code can easily use spreadsheets in your everyday life. For example, to calculate your income and expenses. To track and monitor your finances.
I wonder how many bankruptcies could be avoided if more people just had some basic spreadsheet literacy.
Before I bought a house, I built a stupid simple model to understand what my monthly expenses would look like. What you get an appreciation for is that very quickly you can go from comfortable to precarious with just a few additional fixed expenses (childcare, a new car, a boat).
Without laying it all out and seeing how your numbers change, it's hard to get a visceral appreciation for your finances.
Spreadsheets can be extremely powerful for what-if analyses. They can of course also be abused in that respect, especially in a business context, where complex spreadsheet models can get conflated with reality.
My problem with this is that if you can learn to use excel you can certainly learn to code. It's no harder. A given article for a given task in either is going to be like a 5 minute read.
=SUM(A1:A10) is no easier to do than sum(data$column). Why are we educating generations of excel users instead of generations of R and python users in undergraduate business programs? It seems so wasteful of young educated talent to learn how to do the same thing with such limited software, if its no harder to learn a general purpose software like python or R and do that same thing plus infinite more things.
Spreadsheets are a great way to introduce coding to someone because the variables are visible - it's not some esoteric concept of memory and pointers, it's just whatever is in cell A3.
