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The other thing people don't realize about Excel is that it has a compressed, in-memory, columnstore analytics database built into it. It was called Power Pivot then Power Query, not sure if it changed names again, but it's actually a SQL Server Analysis Services Tabular Model, the same thing that's in Power BI as well. It's going to perform much better than a row-oriented RDBMS at aggregating columns because that's all it was designed to do.

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It was a separate data processing engine within Excel developed by another team (SQL server) for the purposes of self service BI (Power Pivot/Query). Most probably, this engine is not used for normal (traditional) calculations.

You mean if you create the pivot table from data in a sheet? It's not needed for that because you'll run out of memory trying to fit any more than about a couple million rows in a sheet first. Meanwhile you can easily load 10s and possibly 100s of millions of rows into Power Query.

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