EXCEL in Statistics

Conversation at an on-line forum for actuary students: "I am in college and will be taking my first statistics course, and the course description is: theory and applications in statistical analysis. Combinations, permutations, probability, distributions of discrete and continuous random variables, expectation, and common distributions (including normal). I was reading about the class on RateMyProfessor and apparently it is kind of an EXCEL based class. My question is what kind of EXCEL stuff do you think I would need to know for a statistics class?" "You can't do any real statistics with EXCEL. Use R." "Yes. Use R. And never use it again after college." "Take the class and don't worry about it. EXCEL is not difficult to learn and frankly it is something you should learn. In fact, the EXCEL you learn in this class could be the most useful stuff you learn in college - and you might learn some statistics too."