I assume they mean performance wise. Excel could have larger hard limits but handle complex sheets worse.

Google Sheets is an unusable dumpster fire. I just tried to import a 3 million row CSV yesterday and it wasn't able to do it. INDEX/MATCH don't even work properly! Basically unusable unless you need it for scheduling parties or whatever people use Airtable for.

Have you considered using a different tool for the job? Processing 3 millions rows of CVS sounds like a task that is more fitting for a small script than Excel/Google Sheet.

Google Sheet excels at many other tasks, but it's not a replacement for specialized tool (and it should not).

Yes of course, I originally generated the file using Pandas but it's always a pain in the ass to remember the magical incantations to make pretty 2D graphs that aren't fugly. That being said, I have a knack for making great 3D graphs that are awesome! In any case, it's hard when my employer doesn't just gimme that juicy Excel subscription because cost-cutting and efficiencies.

In the end I put on my robe and wizard hat and used matplotlib. (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Seaborn in Python to make matplotlib pretty by default + plot some uncommon graphs. `%matplotlib widget` to make matplotlib interactive. Plotly in Python if you want decent graphs that are also interactive by default.

Observable if you want an interactive, hosted visualization notebook (and all their libraries are open source, except their UI). Plotly, Observable's Plot library, or D3 if you don't mind JavaScript. Can bundle libraries + data + visualization into a single html file and deliver that as an interactive report; once you have the base template down it's decently ergonomic.

Plotly is my current default when I'm working with Jupyter, though. Sane defaults are nice.

I'd love to learn if I'm doing something wrong, but Sheets has terrible performance compared to Excel in my experience.

Not just sheet sizes, but Sheets feels much slower and has a vastly weaker toolset. Just the fact that the browser takes precedence for keyboard commands from the web app makes the usability suffer massively.