> Putting more than 1M rows of data into Excel is not possible, and once you get into the low 100K's, it becomes almost unbearable.

I dispute this. Yes, the normal spreadsheet view of excel will buckle under 1M rows, but excel has another feature called "Power Pivot" that is backed by an embedded database and scales into the high millions at least.

I've personally used excel on a dataset of 18M rows and PowerPivot handled it just fine.

[0] https://support.office.com/client/Data-Model-specification-a...

[1] https://support.office.com/client/power-pivot-powerful-data-...