alt Hacker News> You have to learn how to use SQL to use SQL.
As with any other tool one has to learn it to effectively use it. Some find the learning curve not worth it and stick with Excel which is OK. But the thing is even Excel has to be learned to make full use of its potential.
Keep in mind that the context is around domain experts being able to transcribe their domain knowledge into a machine-understandable language without concern for the intricacies of the machine it is executed on. That is where COBOL and SQL are said to have failed to live up to the hype, of which I'd agree. SQL is not a particularly good abstraction. Even for relatively trivial tasks, you still need to understand how computers work. EXPLAIN is the bread and butter of SQL users.
Ultimately every abstraction is leaky. There will never be a solution where you never need to understand how computers work under all circumstances. But my impression is that you can go a lot further in Excel before the stuff going on behind the scenes starts to get in your way? From what I have seen, Excel itself is more likely to get in your way before not knowing how computers work does.