[tryitnow]

Excel superuser here. There's a lot of excel users who aren't comfortable with SQL, but I think they're a dying breed. The SQL you need to know for about 99% of your workflow is something you can learn in a couple of weekends. Most of the younger people I know learn SQL basics in college (I'm talking about business people, not just engineers).

Spreadsheets are just really terrible at data manipulation. Good Excel analysts know this and understand why a query language is so useful.

Data usage is exploding and business users want to roll their own analyses and not wait around for an IT ticket to be filled. So having business users able to easily use SQL in Excel makes things a lot more efficient.

Using VLOOKUP functions and pivot tables is just not an elegant solution to a lot of data problems. A SQL script would be much more useful.