I remember in 8th grade about 26 years ago being taught how to use Microsoft Works, including its word processor, spreadsheet, and its database.

Yeah for those who think it's a new problem for Microsoft to have multiple teams working on different overlapping projects, they've been doing that shit since at least the 90's. At one point in time they had at least three word processors in active development: MS Word, MS Works, and Wordpad.

MS Works was kind of MS Office Junior. It was packaged as one app instead of a bundle of several but you'd choose which function you'd want to use right now. It had a spreadsheet and the main difference between it and Excel was you were limited to one worksheet. And it had a database function which visually looked a lot like a spreadsheet, nothing like Access. Good enough for Dad to catalog his VHS collection. Except they stopped supporting works years ago, I think Word and Excel can open Works files but I don't know about Works database files are rather esoteric now. Then there's MS Access which is itself being killed off.

There's a rather big gulf between "just slightly misuse Excel" and "learn SQL."