As a French living in Germany, I often take the train to visit some friends/family. I would say it's working well from Frankfurt to Lyon or Frankfurt to Paris and not too expensive if you have a Bahncard and you can plan your trip in advance. But IMO, it the least we should expect from 2 neighboring countries.
I'm very excited to see the resurgence of night trains though, I love this mean of transport in particular!
Where I was working Excel was used for the specification of scientific data. You get stuff like thousands of rows in several sheets themselves in multiple files that inherit from one another and everything is edited by hand... And I maintained a tool that combined them to create binary files from this mess. Lot of fun.