I agree in some sense, but disagree in another. I am fast at Excel. I don't need to use to mouse, look at the menus, or pause to find anything I'm looking for, because I've internalized the keyboard shortcuts and created quick macros for the things I need to do. People get a little flustered when they see me work in Excel because it looks like it's magically doing stuff, but it just comes from lots and lots of repetition.

Contrast this with a proper database, where I need to figure out some way to load the data in, make sure my query accounts for every place there might be a null value, then make some change that might break my previous queries if I need to add or change a column or something. And then if I need to take a slice of data and present it, I have to load it into Excel anyway.

For very large datasets with fairly static requirements, I use a database as is proper. But for anything less than 100K rows, give me a spreadsheet any day.