Bye Bye Microsoft Office, Hello LibreOffice
Excel is a piece of software that I would absolutely not hesitate to pay for... but I'm unfortunately stuck with LibreOffice.I used to work in an insurance company on an actuarial pricing team where the preferred tool was Excel (the modelling was pretty simple). Needless to say, I became very accustomed to and adept with using Excel. We definitely pushed the limits... but what was nice was being able to grab 600K records (maybe 20 cols) from a DB, throw it in Excel and get some results in a matter of minutes. You might have to wait a few seconds based on what you were trying to do, but Excel could handle it.At home I run Linux... where there is no Excel, so I use LibreOffice instead. Just a few days ago I was poking around the Himalayan Database[1] and one of the tables has about 50K records. LibreOffice absolutely chokes when I try to do any filtering or calculations. As well, the pivot tables in Excel are in a totally different league than LibreOffice in terms performance and flexibility. It's unfortunate because I try to support OSS as much as possible... but LibreOffice is just so painful.You could argue that I'm using the wrong tool for the job. Ultimately, I do throw it in SQLite or Pandas, but Excel is just so nice for ad hocs if it fits in memory.[1] https://www.himalayandatabase.com/