I'm not a data scientist but lately I've learned NumPy, Pandas and now I'm learning Matplotlib and Seaborn and after years of Excel the improvement is astounding.

Excel is far easier to approach (I casually use it since I was 6) but once you need to do more advanced stuff it requires a lot of tricks and workarounds which needs to be memorized and are hard to find just by reasoning or are straight impossible without the use of macros which introduces many compatibility issues.

Pandas on the other hand is harder to approach but once you learn the concepts between its basic data structures you can do a lot with little "Google-Fu".