While microsoft excel can be an efficient tool for developing a dss, compared to using a programming language like c++, a shortcoming of excel is it cannot be used effectively for small or medium sized problems. excel is not widely understood compared to a language like c++. it is not widely available for purchase. errors can creep into formulas somewhat easily?

Although Microsoft Excel isn't a language itself, nor does it come with its own built-in language, I do see what you mean regarding its ability to create functions and whatnot to make the spreadsheet more versatile and efficient.

Yeah, syntactical errors (or compile errors in a compiled language like C++), are going to be harder to spot in Excel than it would be in a programming language, surprisingly. This is because of the reason that I just said; most programming languages such as C++ are compiled languages, meaning that they are written in an IDE (such as Visual Studio, for C++), which is used for writing out, debugging, and compiling programs in to a executable format. The IDE would not let the compilation process finish successfully unless there were no syntax errors in the code itself (not to be confused with runtime errors; those are the harder ones to iron out, as the compiler will not tell you there is an error).