I think you are...dramatically underestimating the size of many "modern" datasets and what most scientists want to do with them. We record (electrical) neural

I think you are...dramatically underestimating the size of many "modern" datasets and what most scientists want to do with them. We record (electrical) neural activity from behaving animals. The raw data is about 1 Gb/minute, and we collect hours of it per day, 5-7 days/week. The lab next door has microscopes that produce image sets that are in the Gb to Tb range (big swathes of human brains, imaged at micron resolution). An RNAseq experiment is ~20 Gb range; other genomic things are similar, maybe a bit smaller. All of this would be intractable in Excel, even over a long weekend :-) On top of that, Excel often doesn't do much of what you would need: there's basically no support for signal processing or image analysis or genomic work.