[caractacus]

And the data size limit is excel is stifling. 1m maximum rows? That can get filled very quickly.

[mistermann]

With Power Pivot it's quite a bit better, this guy did 122 million rows:

http://www.microsofttrends.com/2014/02/09/how-much-data-can-...

If that's not enough you can do SSAS Tabular + DirectQuery (although to be fair, that's no longer "pure Excel", but an end user likely doesn't care):

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh230898.aspx