Personally, I strongly prefer working with GSheets to Excel. It handles large sheets better and you never worry about the app crashing and taking your precious work along with it.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a time when I wanted to use a spreadsheet for anything moderately complicated where gsheets was up to snuff. That’s not to say that excel doesn’t have problems or does things easily, but it doesn’t lead to quite the same level of frustration and hair-pulling, and indeed it’s usually possible to achieve things in excel when they are impossible in gsheets. Indeed that app even struggles at the ‘easy’ task of being able to fiddle around with table formatting. Its sole advantage is the collaboration. It can be used as a place to dump small amounts of varied tabular data to share but not really for calculation or analysis.
With Excel you have to ensure the file is there, and readable, not tampered with, etc.
This allowed us to create better multi-workbook "apps" that have a bit more modularity - you could even embed sheets into a webpage as a view-only client.
In the end, Excel is good for us only for interoperability with external groups.
Google Sheet excels at many other tasks, but it's not a replacement for specialized tool (and it should not).
In the end I put on my robe and wizard hat and used matplotlib. (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
Observable if you want an interactive, hosted visualization notebook (and all their libraries are open source, except their UI). Plotly, Observable's Plot library, or D3 if you don't mind JavaScript. Can bundle libraries + data + visualization into a single html file and deliver that as an interactive report; once you have the base template down it's decently ergonomic.
Plotly is my current default when I'm working with Jupyter, though. Sane defaults are nice.
Not just sheet sizes, but Sheets feels much slower and has a vastly weaker toolset. Just the fact that the browser takes precedence for keyboard commands from the web app makes the usability suffer massively.
It will be extremely funny to see how Google does this whole "rewrite all our office products to use <canvas> instead of the DOM" project over the next couple quarters... he says, laughing, shaking his head at the wasted effort... Caesar wept for there were no more worlds to conquer