"Easy" is tough when it comes to relational databases. Even Access requires a decent amount of technical know-how when compared to the people who use Excel heavily. In Excel Power Query and the M language are quite powerful. You can combine tables from both your sheets and/or a variety of external sources and create relational views into them. You can then display these views on a sheet.
When I worked for a company where corporate used it, the problem was that people would come to me for help. M is pretty easy to learn so it wasn't a big deal for me. But I am a software dev with database experience, so I'm not sure who the target market is here--it's not the pure Excel users. Like, they wanted tables from a shared folder appended on each other and joined to another table. In pure Power Query you can do this without too much trouble, but you need to know what you are doing. These people have trouble with VLOOKUP already (I mean the string/int problem is unintuitive, so I'm not talking about that), so this is an impossible task for them.
It's confusing that Excel supports relational database operations at all. If you want to query the data in Excel it should seamlessly push you into Access rather than partially recreating the same functions.
> It's confusing that Excel supports relational database operations at all
I'd say it's for the better: sometimes you want to stay in the same tool, and it's the tool's job to interpret your intent.
Imagine you are editing a markdown file and have a picture in your Windows clipboard.
IMHO, the proper action would be to output base64 encoded jpeg data, even if it's "partially recreating the same functions", as it makes a copy-paste of screenshots from say the snipping tool (Win Shift S) seamless.
BTW, github doesn't support base64 encoded jpeg or png data, under the excuse that SVG could have security implications (which is true but not applicable for png/jpg) so don't bother trying it over there...
When I worked for a company where corporate used it, the problem was that people would come to me for help. M is pretty easy to learn so it wasn't a big deal for me. But I am a software dev with database experience, so I'm not sure who the target market is here--it's not the pure Excel users. Like, they wanted tables from a shared folder appended on each other and joined to another table. In pure Power Query you can do this without too much trouble, but you need to know what you are doing. These people have trouble with VLOOKUP already (I mean the string/int problem is unintuitive, so I'm not talking about that), so this is an impossible task for them.