I find the world is full of datasets with < 200 datapoints, and that is where excel (in my experience) is great. With such datasets it often makes sense to look through the data at particular outliers.

Also, even with huge datasets I tend to always look at a random sample, and the "most extreme" datapoints -- mainly because in my experience there is a good chance some parts of the data are malformed, and need to be recollected/fixed. Of course, if you trust your data collection you don't need this!