I have written a lot of SQL over the years, and consider myself to be reasonably well versed with SQL and relational databases. SQL doesn't allow you to act on

I have written a lot of SQL over the years, and consider myself to be reasonably well versed with SQL and relational databases. SQL doesn't allow you to act on your data while seeing it. The interaction modes are totally different. In SQL: Type query -> See some results -> Repeat Excel: Everything in front of your eyes. You are manipulating live data. That is not something you do in SQL. (SQL doesn't mean much though, as it is a standard and not a tool. Maybe you had some specific SQL based tooling in mind) > Excel stops scaling at about a million rows. A large amount of real world data has less than a million rows. Every tool will stop at some point. At that point the benefits of Excel fade away, even if it could handle the data, as 1M rows are too large for our brain to make a sense of live. >My cutoff at this point is that I'll use Excel if I expect my analysis to take less than five minutes A lot of real world analysis takes 5 minutes. Of course, Excel is not perfect, and I too will never use Excel for anything that has to be done repeatedly (pandas or similar solutions are perfect here), but for quick and dirty data exploration, Excel is very good.