Out of curiosty, what kinds of things would actually hit the row limit? It's hard for me to imagine a situation where you have enough data points to reach it, but don't have any specialised software to analyze it.
Excel for this is significantly faster and more flexible than any other tool I’ve used.
Also transport data and models can often use many columns. Google Docs limit is actually the active cells used so this then reduces the row limit further.
If we receive data that is a few million rows on bigger formats, we will still use excel, just with PowerQuery / PowerPivot and using measures which works pretty well up to 10 million records or so.
Bigger than that and we will use PowerBI.