PowerQuery and the built in data model do a lot to make Excel better at handling joins in a sane fashion, but are relatively recent features that some are still

PowerQuery and the built in data model do a lot to make Excel better at handling joins in a sane fashion, but are relatively recent features that some are still realizing are there in the first place, particularly for the Office365/Mac crowd. Nice way to keep your basic tables basic and still maintain the full depth of your relationships all inside of Excel. Throw in some calculated columns and measures using DAX and it's a pretty darn powerful tool. That said, in the data science world, there's a LOT of crossover when it comes to functionality, between tools like Excel, Tableau, and *SQL in particular. And the crossover seems to be growing by the day, especially with Python functionality being built into Excel in the near future.