Tables are, of course, an excellent way of organizing data. Now add in the easy point and click UI and simple formulas to get you hooked, and soon you find yourself deep in VLOOKUPS and macros with no way back. Excel eases you into data organisation and manipulation. Many tools are better for any given task, but Excel excels at generalising.
I taught an engineer how to do 2D iterative scenarios with TABLE(), and his XLS files began taking 30+ minutes to open. Every XLS ended with "-DANGERTABLES.xls" to remind us not to accidentally click it and kill our machines. [For those who don't know, it's basically a way to reduce a massively interconnected spreadsheet (dozens of sheets) as f(x,y)=z, and then make hundreds of tables built with that function. Insanely powerful, but causes spreadsheets to grind to halt every time you touch a cell (unless you turn off auto computation).]
