[probablybroken]

That's really strange... I always found Excel to perform dreadfully on data sets with even just hundreds of thousands of rows - it was always easier to just load the data into a database, or manipulate it with a script.

[juped]

That's because you don't know how to use Excel (this isn't a knock on you, no one ever tells people how to use Excel). Excel sheets have a hard row limit of around a million rows, but long before you approach that you will have moved your data into the "Data Model", which is a relational table engine stapled on to Excel, or to some other backend which you will query from Excel (often via the Data Model).