Tables are probably the most overlooked feature of Excel.
Why use tables?
* Each column is uniquely named - no more wondering if you are referencing the right cell, no more thinking about "to $ or not to $"
* The table's rows and columns are reliably discovered by pivot tables - no more wondering if the entire dataset is referenced by the pivot
* New columns that are formulas are automatically applied to every row
* Tables have names, so it is easy to understand which table a pivot is referencing
The true, reliable and sane power of excel lies in Tables + Pivots + Charts. If you drive most of the problem solving into those paradigms you will keep hair!
Most people have no clue these features exist, or that Excel even has advanced data modeling that supports all sorts of goodies including strict types and joins/merges/appends. It's not as accessible as just basic sheets, but I've had no problem crunching millions of rows of data in Excel with sub-second response times.
Excel 2013 and later has a columnar database capable of handling millions of rows, but not through the standard sheets interface so it loses a lot of the utility people are used to.
Yes, although you can have multiple sheets each with a million rows. Kind of like sharding.
But I’d be fascinated what kind of system spec is required to get good performance on those kind of numbers. I’ve been on a Mac for years, where Excel is crippled by limitations.
Tables have that all-too-common symptom of something that makes easy things even easier, but hard things way harder. Try making a table with a formula that involves more than the single row in which it's placed. What about tables with multi-row headers (e.g. title and units)? Section breaks in them? Merged parent data? I find I either want standard Excel layout, or a database. Tables don't really sit "between" those two; they're just their own extremely over-simplified universe that doesn't play nicely with anything else.
But hey, to each their own. Good on ya if Excel tables are what you need.
This, combined with judicious use of named ranges makes for much more pleasant formulas. Seeing `tax_rate` in the formula instead of `A$7$` is well worth the extra clicks.
I usually end up assigning names to nearly everything, single-cell constants, user input fields, computed lists, etc, etc
About tables, do they work when you automate the data entry part? For example, copy from a speadsheet into your spreadsheet with the first macro, and then transform the data with a second? That's 90% of my use case for Excel. (I know that doing this in Python/whatever would be "better" but I have to distribute this to users, and the only thing they have on their computer is Excel, and they're gonna manipulate the data after in Excel anyways).
I think Libreoffice Calc supports python integration. Maybe that way one could have the best of both worlds. Unfortunately I suppose most users are stuck in the MS garden.
On the one hand, it is great for doing a quick and dirty analysis with data not in a DB, on the other, it mangles data and translates the keywords/function names.
Why use tables?
* Each column is uniquely named - no more wondering if you are referencing the right cell, no more thinking about "to $ or not to $"
* The table's rows and columns are reliably discovered by pivot tables - no more wondering if the entire dataset is referenced by the pivot
* New columns that are formulas are automatically applied to every row
* Tables have names, so it is easy to understand which table a pivot is referencing
The true, reliable and sane power of excel lies in Tables + Pivots + Charts. If you drive most of the problem solving into those paradigms you will keep hair!