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SAS has comparable features (though I prefer R for analysis). Excel is pretty poor for working with moderately sized or larger data sets.

Google Refine is nice for cleaning up and pre-processing data files before exporting elsewhere for analysing.

This thingy opens 2.3 million lines file in something under a minute. Excel will choke, I guess.

Still unix toolset - awk, grep, sort - beats both for most tasks and huge data sets.

Yeah, GR chocked on a 7GB file the other day, had to chop it up in the shell before importing each in turn.

That's when the export/import processing steps feature comes in handy.

As far as I know, Excel has no such comparable tools for data cleanup. Excel doesn't even have built in regexes. On the other hand, Refine is not built for doing calculations. So there's really no comparison except that both programs display data in a tabular format.