This quote of B.D. Ripley soberly describes the state of demand for statistical software nowadays. Not only students of economics, management science and related fields but particularly the industry asks for intuitive, efficient and secure software for statistical data analysis. But not for the sake of high implementation costs and the overhead of a steep learning curve.

Although Excel is the favourite number cruncher it is limited in several ways (for more information see e.g. McCullough B.D., Wilson, B., “On the accuracy of statistical procedures in Microsoft Excel 2000 and Excel XP”, in Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, 40 (2002), pp. 713-721)

How to solve the dilemma of having intuitive graphics and data handling on the one hand and retrieving reliable results on the other hand?

You have a heterogeneous client/server environment? You have a need for distributed computing?
You develop statistical methods on Unix, Linux, Mac and Windows? Or you wish you could?
Your users ask for methods to be also available on Excel for Windows?
You want to provide a scalable method- and database on high-performance servers and grant Excel users access to these?

Then MD*ReX, the COM Add-In connecting Microsoft Excel and XploRe might be of interest to you.