There are two major improvements to Excel that came in 2010 and 2013.
These are Power Pivot and Power Query (Power Query is now backported to 2010 as well).
Power Pivot straight up is SQL Server Analysis Services. It's a heavily optimized in-memory columnstore database engine that is exposed natively through pivot tables and charts in Excel. The fun demo is loading up a table of several hundreds of millions of rows in Power Pivot and interacting with it in a pivot table in Excel. That was back when I had 8GB of RAM.
Power Query is a data shaping and transformation tool, with an expression language largely based on F# (though with an entirely different standard library and some major functionality changes). The single best feature of Power Query, though, is that it provides an audit trail of all steps applied to a dataset. This completely bypasses one of the major problems in Excel, that intermediate steps are impossible to recreate accurately.
Full disclosure I am a consultant with a Microsoft partner and spend a lot of time with these tools.
I appreciate that and I am sure it may be useful to people who do data analysis against a SQL server, but I see very few of those around me. Most use excel to calculate something and for the analysis behind a powerpoint deck. None of that is ever a simple sum or average of a column. If it does involve data, it usually involves non trivial calculations that are not really suited for a database. And if it involves things like aggregating P&L or any financials, unlikely an IT dept in a large organisation will leave that in a SQL server available for any user to mess with.
I don't know what proportion of users Microsoft thinks it caters to with these features but I haven't met any in my 10 years in banking.
Users who do vlookups, use VBA, who need to audit a formula, who need to link a powerpoint deck to excel, etc, that I see every day. And to those, no, no new feature since 2007.
And I see people every day using exactly these pieces of functionality to do nontrivial summarization of data, a thriving blog and forum ecosystem, and Microsoft knocking down my door because their own sales teams can't keep up with the customers wanting to use these features and the Power BI ecosystem.
We all live in bubbles. I recognize mine as the above, but I don't deny that yours exists.
These are Power Pivot and Power Query (Power Query is now backported to 2010 as well).
Power Pivot straight up is SQL Server Analysis Services. It's a heavily optimized in-memory columnstore database engine that is exposed natively through pivot tables and charts in Excel. The fun demo is loading up a table of several hundreds of millions of rows in Power Pivot and interacting with it in a pivot table in Excel. That was back when I had 8GB of RAM.
Power Query is a data shaping and transformation tool, with an expression language largely based on F# (though with an entirely different standard library and some major functionality changes). The single best feature of Power Query, though, is that it provides an audit trail of all steps applied to a dataset. This completely bypasses one of the major problems in Excel, that intermediate steps are impossible to recreate accurately.
Full disclosure I am a consultant with a Microsoft partner and spend a lot of time with these tools.