>I'm not sure what "proper tables" would look like
This is the third time this has come up on Hackernews in the past week.
Excel lets you designate a specific rectangle of cells as a named "table" (this is not the same thing as a pivot table). Each named column in the table automatically gets its own named range, which belongs to a namespace of that table (rather than the global namespace). A table will automatically expands its bounds when you insert data into cells immediately bordering it. Inserting a formula into the first row automatically fills-down that formula into the entire column. There is special syntax for referring to rows, columns, and ranges of columns within a table. Look up "structured references".
They are very useful. They make big spreadsheets tractable and maintainable. Think of them as mutable, expandable, reactive dataframes. If you're dealing with inherently tabular data in Excel and you're not using the tables feature, you are doing it wrong.
LibreOffice Calc and Google Sheets do not have them, to my endless bafflement.
This is the third time this has come up on Hackernews in the past week.
Excel lets you designate a specific rectangle of cells as a named "table" (this is not the same thing as a pivot table). Each named column in the table automatically gets its own named range, which belongs to a namespace of that table (rather than the global namespace). A table will automatically expands its bounds when you insert data into cells immediately bordering it. Inserting a formula into the first row automatically fills-down that formula into the entire column. There is special syntax for referring to rows, columns, and ranges of columns within a table. Look up "structured references".
They are very useful. They make big spreadsheets tractable and maintainable. Think of them as mutable, expandable, reactive dataframes. If you're dealing with inherently tabular data in Excel and you're not using the tables feature, you are doing it wrong.
LibreOffice Calc and Google Sheets do not have them, to my endless bafflement.