When I first started using spreadsheets professionally (Excel 2009), I was confused—how do I name the columns? Surely you don't just enter the column names in t

When I first started using spreadsheets professionally (Excel 2009), I was confused—how do I name the columns? Surely you don't just enter the column names in the first row! I also tried putting my data into Access. I hated Access and eventually abandoned it. Meanwhile, I pretty quickly decided that Excel is the fastest and overall best Microsoft product by a mile. I now just use Google Sheets, but if you have Windows and need to do lots of spreadsheeting, Excel is just by far the way to go. Far, far better than Libre Office, Numbers, or Google Sheets. To be fair, I was rarely dealing with more than a couple thousand rows. If it were millions, and complicated joins, maybe Access (or probably SQLite) would be better, but oh my god, how is Excel so much faster and more polished than everything else? (Rhetorical question: Joel on Software has some stories that help answer.)