I enjoy using SQL but the idea of using it instead of Excel to visually explore and manipulate data makes me wince. I can do without Word or PowerPoint but Excel, despite all its data handling warts, remains an exceptionally powerful tool for quick one-off data explorations.

I prefer combining SQL with Excel by generating a query that gets most of what I want inside the database and then importing it into excel's powerquery to further explore the individual vectors.

“I’m good at excel but I still can’t get a job.”

“I’d rather use SQL though”

There’s something profoundly concise here in these sentences.

I have multiple excel spreadsheets that query a database for data using a SQL query I wrote, that then displays excel based reports/dashboards. You can also grab data from a bunch of other sources - sharepoint, etc.

Then you can just update from excel and everything is in the right format for non programming people to use.

The thing about excel is that for large orgs its probably on every computer and almost everyone sort of knows how to use the basics of it. that gives it value.

The real value would be if there was some way I could get excel on a random machine without any privileges to refresh the data itself on a schedule.

One thing about Excel is that people don't see it as "programming," so they might consider it to be a job skill even if you're not marketing yourself as a programmer per se.

They have a SQL connector in excel now. And many more connectors.