I can hardly imagine what is that which is easy in Excel but hard in Python with Pandas and SqliteiteAlchemy/Pytable/whatever and matplotlib.

What really annoys me in Excel is they won't replace the fossil VBA with Python, F# or a new language designed from scratch right for this. The VBA environment feels fun to touch to have the feeling of time-travelling back to the years of your childhood but it feels quite clumsy in actual programming.

Excel's plots feature also feels fairly weird. I could never make it to produce exactly the plot I want. Perhaps that's because I haven't mastered it but this means it is harder to master than matplotlib is.