[swiley]

I’d disagree. Some things are hard and the ergonomics makes it worth a little confusion. CAD software like xcircuit is a good example of this (although they definitely could stand to make the save dialog a little more intuitive.)

[AmericanChopper]

Becoming an advanced photoshop user is difficult too. But I can still fire it up and doing basic image editing with about 2 minutes worth of figuring-out. Excel is almost a full RDBMS, but the basics don’t really need any training.

[swiley]

I don’t think excel can do joins which is a big part of the “R” in RDBMS but I don’t use excel often so I could be wrong.

[LyndsySimon]

I'm fairly sure it can. It's been years - almost a decade, now! - since I've had to use Excel for anything productive, but I vividly recall using VLOOKUP to create what were effectively views from a SQL perspective.

[AmericanChopper]

Excel merge supports joins, and you can do ordinary SQL joins using Power Query. I don't know if it full complies with all of Codd's 12 rules, I suspect it probably doesn't fully meet the schema definition or non-subversion bits, but I haven't looked into it closely enough, the Excel Data Model functionality looks like it might actually do that.