I wanted to do everything in Excel lately, but it (at least 2013 that I'm stuck with) seems to be a horrible frankensteinian mishmash of features that don't work together. For instance, there almost seems to be the infrastructure for building a virtual database in a spreadsheet, but there are a million different things that trip you up, like the not-quite-integration of PowerPivot, the use of DAX instead of SQL, the missing VBA interface for crucial things. I still don't know why you can use OData from Excel, but then you add something to the data model and try to get to it from PowerPivot, and you don't have permissions for the exact same URL and then the whole thing gets corrupted.
Within Office, it seems more practical to do ambitious things with Access, although that has its issues too. I apparently completely corrupted a database I've been using just by pasting part of a SQL statement that was >= 1024 characters as part of a VBA script.
Within Office, it seems more practical to do ambitious things with Access, although that has its issues too. I apparently completely corrupted a database I've been using just by pasting part of a SQL statement that was >= 1024 characters as part of a VBA script.