When I first started using spreadsheets professionally (Excel 2009), I was confused—how do I name the columns? Surely you don't just enter the column names in the first row! I also tried putting my data into Access.

I hated Access and eventually abandoned it. Meanwhile, I pretty quickly decided that Excel is the fastest and overall best Microsoft product by a mile. I now just use Google Sheets, but if you have Windows and need to do lots of spreadsheeting, Excel is just by far the way to go. Far, far better than Libre Office, Numbers, or Google Sheets.

To be fair, I was rarely dealing with more than a couple thousand rows. If it were millions, and complicated joins, maybe Access (or probably SQLite) would be better, but oh my god, how is Excel so much faster and more polished than everything else? (Rhetorical question: Joel on Software has some stories that help answer.)

Shame as Access is really powerful and far easier to use than Excel if you're familiar with SQL.

Pre-web I used it for internal process automation - it required less effort than anything else (including modern capable frameworks like Rails) to provide a lot of functionality to applications with a low number of concurrent users (1-20 users).

I do really miss that - this kind of app is now often implemented with a low-code platform (with expensive consultants) or a web framework (5-10x the effort required for the same results).