Word (by default) puts shapes in a static/relative position line with text and makes it hard to move shapes around without changing the text wrapping setting for individual shapes.

Excel (by default) puts shapes in a absolute position that can be freely moved around and repositioned.

PowerPoint does the same thing with shapes but there isn't a grid to draw on top on.

Excel also gives you an infinite canvas to work with.

"Huh. Excel only goes to 16,384 columns." Said my office-mate many years ago in grad school, when he was putting all of his data in one giant spreadsheet.

It also once had a row limit. I believe it was 32k, but its been a while. I remember having to program my perl reporting tool to add a new sheet each time.

It still has a row limit (and other limits), just bigger now (1048576).

Ref: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/excel-specification...