I have found Excel to be quite useful for collecting data, doing summary analysis of logs, etc. I also liked this blog post from Mandiant, about using Excel to timeline artefacts with very different structure. It takes a bit of work using find, left, mid, right, concat, etc, but then it is quite useful! Another good thing is that a lot of people are better at creating Excel sheets than doing XPath queries.

Anyone else using Excel for DFIR, and how do you use it?