For personal use, Libre office does everything I need. For work, Excel is an absolute beast. It doesn’t necessarily scale, but for those one off data comparison, manipulation, or validation often I can do it faster and easier than I can in SQL. VLookup was kinda cool. Index match is definitely powerful.

I still generally avoid the vb macros though I’ve found solutions online occasionally where they’re useful. (Reviewing the code to confirm it’s not malicious first of course.).