One of my many assignments at my job is to work with excel on a weekly basis exporting data dumps from MYSQL to excel ranging from 50k to 100k rows.
At first it was a daunting task but once I learned how to build some solid templates then all I had to do was to dump the data set into a tab and let the formulas do the work, everything was already formatted so I could just start validating the data then email it to the sales team for further analysis.
If you take the time to analyze your data sets and get to know how to handle each type of data then you can build some really solid template in a fairly short amount of time.
I try to avoid using excel as much as possible but this damn thing is so deeply rooted into the "business analyst" world that you can't really escape it so this is why I told myself that I would be better off mastering it and build solid reporting templates instead of trying to change their mind about using alternative software.
On a side note we started using WebFocus... that's another monster to tame...