Whenever working with data, I always use MS Access. Excel is more commonly used, but Access is an actual relational database.
Importing .csv or Excel files takes a couple of clicks. Once there, you can sort, filter, and manipulate data with ease.
Once you have a few tables, you can create relationships between them using a drag-and-drop interface. And deciding which fields to show from which table is all clicks (no code). This method is vastly superior to vlookup() or xlookup() in Excel.
I learned SQL with this method. And before AI, I used it to build complex queries to transform data before loading into Salesforce.
The power of Access comes with its programming language, Visual Basic for Application (VBA). Excel has this too, but I find it more useful in Access.
The takeaway
A while back, I hosted a paid webinar on how to use Access to transform data into Salesforce. I’m thinking of re-hosting it, so if you’re interested, please let me know.