We have people who have been using Excel for decades and it's a key part of what they do. They wouldn't know a pivot table if poked them in the ribs and said hey, I'm a pivot table, let's pivot baby. Yet, it's one of the simplest and most powerful uses of Excel (something I'm finding difficult to replicate elsewhere, leastways with that kind of fast, intuitive simplicity). I honestly caught someone making a 'pivot table' by copying the values onto a piece of paper. They were amazed when I showed them how to do it and then they went back to doing it on paper (because they 'forgot'). Things like VLOOKUP and MATCH are voodoo. Good god, I created a frequency distribution with an array formula for someone the other day. I think cerebrospinal fluid squirted out of his nose (at least I hope it was that). How did you know how to do that? he gasped. The mere expedient of Googling it may be a first foot on the path to enlightenment.
Of course, some realism, while I know I could probably better use a database for some of the projects I do, I don't realistically have time to learn and do this (and my bosses would argue I'm paid too much for that kind of dibbling, for which they would be right, but then I don't have another resource to delegate it to).
And of course, there are dangers. I'm forever being asked to create graphics for important presentations, which is nice, but none of the people who request them realise that they take time, and sometimes a lot of time. I have to work with the data teams, get the data, figure out what the data is, work with the data team because wtf-does-that-mean, analyse the data, etc. and then figure out ways to graphically present it in ways that are both informative and appealing, and then design and produce the final product (usually in a couple of formats and versions). This can be several weeks work. Not an afternoon because you need something impressive because you're meeting a government minister in the morning. I get this all the time.
I made the mistake the other week of breaking my own no-video rule and producing a quick show-and-tell for a new feature (because our video monkey has a four-month backlog). Scribbled a storyboard, figured out how to use Camtasia to do some basic screen capture and narration, did a few animations in Keynote and graphics to lead in and out, sewed it all together. We're talking Uwe Boll and not Steven Spielberg here. Well, you can guess what happened. Oh could you do...