You will find this article of considerable reading value, if you belong to at least ONE of the following spreadsheet user categories: Owners of Small Businesses _ Restaurants/Bars, Hotels, Hospitals, Factories, Consultants etc; Decision Makers/Job Holders in Corporations _ Materials Managers, Sales/Marketing Analysts, Financial Analysts/Accountants, Project Engineers; And Anyone desiring to make BETTER sense _ and use _ of data!
In effect what I am saying is that companies which get the most value from spreadsheet automation(including using it to avoid expenditure on less adaptable commercial off the shelf applications) will be those which empower their users to routinely generate "in house" solutions. In such companies, you will find that only when the requirement becomes considerably specialised or complex, does the IT department get called upon to develop or purchase software solutions for user departments or functions with significant data recording and analysis needs.
At times, they would prefer to click a button that says "Print ABC", or "Print XYZ" report, instead of having to crawl all over the huge spreadsheet(and get "lost" every now and then), to highlight and print different report pages. Using a custom built data entry form to make data entries into 14 different cells in different parts of a table(at the same time/with one click) would, for them, be "heaven" compared to making the entries one at a time.
The savings _ from using your "in house" expertise _ in terms of money and man_hours alone, will quickly justify the investment you make in "developing the needed skills" _ especially, when you compare what you spend with the cost of purchasing a commercial software application _ or even engaging the services of an Excel VB developer.