Ask HN: What do the enlightened use when the rest of us use Excel?

So, I've come into a large amount of statistical data. It's all quite simple and uniform: just a sequence of scores for three actors, which form a series of games. Every so often there's one of a couple discrete events that can be overlaid on top of a score.

So I want to parse it; just do a bunch of your standard avgs and sums. I've never used Excel in such depth before but as of right now it seems awfully ill-suited for the job. Simple (cognitively) operations like 'if this is the highest value in the column', or 'return the number of times the following string appears in the search region' (already I have to kludge in faked strings, because there's no way that I can see to tag a cell with metadata to represent an event) are either totally missing, or implemented in such a roundabout manner that they're very brittle.

So what do you, hacker news, use when you need to slice and dice your numbers? Short of starting from scratch in Python or Perl, what (hacker-friendly) environments are there that will allow greater flexibility and modularity when it comes to spreadsheet applications?