Thanks for the tip! The main issue in this particular case was that I never work with Excel, so I was shipped Excel files via Google Sheets (since I have no Excel license on my Mac). I was mostly trying to get into some environment that I was comfortable with so I could work confidently while others were waiting. Datasette was the best tool I could think of that would allow me full SQL access while also presenting a web page others could grok easily. The terminal is home for me, but I think it's off-putting to some, and Datasette bridges that nicely.
If the terminal is your home, I would suggest looking at something already mentioned by someone else VisiData (http://visidata.org), it is great for exploring all sorts of data files like CSV, Excel, Sqlite3, etc in the terminal.
This is fantastic! Thanks so much for the pointer...the ability to traverse tons of data formats quickly to "get a feel" for them (much like simonw's use case for some of the sqlite-utils) is exactly the tooling I need in cases like this, and the TUI interface is an awesome bonus. Will definitely be playing around with this over the next few days...thanks!
