A hammer to hit all nails : organizing tasks, managing project, modeling business, etc..

I think spread sheets software is alike a Swiss army knife
useful to do a lot of things, a modeling tool for an business
analyst, an online log book for engineers, a budgeting tool
for a manager, a project tasks tracker - I learned in an
project management seminar that Microsoft engineers use
Microsoft Excel as their project management tool instead
of its MS Project - to organize tasks and track progress.
It is a workman's hammer to hit all nails in a work place.

In a "low volume - high variety" prototyping place, a
spread sheet can be developed for task organization.

A spreadsheet with product or prototype's attributes:

1) products platforms and
2) derivatives (variants of the product platforms)
3) prototyping/production stage: design, development,
debugging, or distribution of the prototype
4) different color or shading scheme can be used to
discriminate the tasks' priority, the prototyping stage, etc..

Such a simple tool can help one product guy to track and
manage multiple products.

Meanwhile, a "high volume - low variety" manufacturing
place, a spread sheet can be developed to collect statistics
from production and to analyze and reduce the variances.