It's unfortunately not available in the Mac client, but Excel also has an amazingly powerful and useful tool called PowerPivot/Get & Transform[1].
You can connect to external data sources such as CSV files, Excel files, any database with an ODBC connector, APIs, all kinds of neat things. Ingest that data into your Excel file, create an enforce constraints and relationships within your data model, gives you incredibly robust data munging and analysis functionality[2], and then expose all of that as a PivotTable. And the functionality itself bypasses the limitations of Excel such as max data size or computationally inefficient formula implementations, as it uses a separate data storage and computational engine that's a highly compressed columnar data store.
The PowerPivot work is also mostly transferable to PowerBI and Analysis Services. Taken together, you've got all the tools to apply progressive enhancements for end users. Let them create their Excel-based stuff. When it starts to become more mission critical, non-performant, or error-prone, provide them with support to clean it up in the ways that video from Joel Spolsky mentions. When it hits growing pains from that, refactor it further to leverage the built-in data modeling capabilities to enforce some integrity, automation, and potential data volume scaling. And when you hit growing pains with that, or the underly process/usage finally matures to a state of stability, or you need to address security/access/audit-ability concerns, transfer that data model and everything to either PowerBI or an Analysis Server deployment and migrate the management to IT.
I don't see it in practice very often, but it's an incredibly effective and frictionless way to both enable your business users to innovate their work processes via the tools they know, while also providing a non-disruptive way to mitigate your business becoming reliant on apocryphal spreadsheets being passed around to support critical business functions. And by design alleviates many of the causes of "automation" projects failing.
You can connect to external data sources such as CSV files, Excel files, any database with an ODBC connector, APIs, all kinds of neat things. Ingest that data into your Excel file, create an enforce constraints and relationships within your data model, gives you incredibly robust data munging and analysis functionality[2], and then expose all of that as a PivotTable. And the functionality itself bypasses the limitations of Excel such as max data size or computationally inefficient formula implementations, as it uses a separate data storage and computational engine that's a highly compressed columnar data store.
The PowerPivot work is also mostly transferable to PowerBI and Analysis Services. Taken together, you've got all the tools to apply progressive enhancements for end users. Let them create their Excel-based stuff. When it starts to become more mission critical, non-performant, or error-prone, provide them with support to clean it up in the ways that video from Joel Spolsky mentions. When it hits growing pains from that, refactor it further to leverage the built-in data modeling capabilities to enforce some integrity, automation, and potential data volume scaling. And when you hit growing pains with that, or the underly process/usage finally matures to a state of stability, or you need to address security/access/audit-ability concerns, transfer that data model and everything to either PowerBI or an Analysis Server deployment and migrate the management to IT.
I don't see it in practice very often, but it's an incredibly effective and frictionless way to both enable your business users to innovate their work processes via the tools they know, while also providing a non-disruptive way to mitigate your business becoming reliant on apocryphal spreadsheets being passed around to support critical business functions. And by design alleviates many of the causes of "automation" projects failing.
[1] https://support.office.com/en-us/article/get-transform-and-p...
[2] It doesn't rely on the same functions exposed for Excel formulas, but rather a language called M for ETL-like needs and DAX for calculations. https://support.office.com/en-us/article/how-power-query-and...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Pivot#Product_history_an...