There are plenty of much better tools that many economists use. For example, Stata. Stata allows you to view your data at any point in time in a nice table, but

There are plenty of much better tools that many economists use. For example, Stata. Stata allows you to view your data at any point in time in a nice table, but also to manipulate it using a very easy to learn (and yet very expressive) language that you can write interactively as well as in .do files. The economist I worked for wanted the whole process, from cleaning the data, running the regressions, outputting the tables, etc., to be in a set of .do files so we could hand over the original data files and all the code for review and replication. While building the final analysis, though, you could also work interactively to figure out what you wanted the final product to be, though of course you could log everything you did interactively so there would always be a record.