You talk about SQL being great, yet you probably never had to download data from tables where the headers are German abbreviations, or gibberish due to 8 character limit in 1985.
SQL is greatER than excel's default mode of addressing data. As russian, I've worked with a very diverse data sources in different encodings during my career, fair amount of broken CSV's, xml's, etc, cleanups, joins, sqlite processing etc. And yes, many, many excel files used as a poor man's data entry software to cleanup. No german abbreviations, right, just poorly made russian transliterations.
