>I'm not sure what "proper tables" would look like

This is the third time this has come up on Hackernews in the past week.

Excel lets you designate a specific rectangle of cells as a named "table" (this is not the same thing as a pivot table). Each named column in the table automatically gets its own named range, which belongs to a namespace of that table (rather than the global namespace). A table will automatically expands its bounds when you insert data into cells immediately bordering it. Inserting a formula into the first row automatically fills-down that formula into the entire column. There is special syntax for referring to rows, columns, and ranges of columns within a table. Look up "structured references".

They are very useful. They make big spreadsheets tractable and maintainable. Think of them as mutable, expandable, reactive dataframes. If you're dealing with inherently tabular data in Excel and you're not using the tables feature, you are doing it wrong.

LibreOffice Calc and Google Sheets do not have them, to my endless bafflement.

Not having proper tables in a spreadsheet app is like a programming language not having arrays.

You can get by without them through countless crappy hacks, but nobody would ever choose a language that couldn't support arrays.

IT chooses Google Sheets for whole companies every day even though they aren't sophisticated, or often even daily, users of any of the apps.

In excel you can convert any range into a dedicated table object, which lets you give it a proper name, select rows/columns (with ctrl/shift+space), and use column names in formula (with `tablename[columnname]`). You can also load the table into powerquery to do things like decompositions or augmentations without modifying the original data.

^ seconded. If you learn tables with Excel you become a demigod, and if you learn Power Query with Excel tables you become a being of pure energy and are then tasked by management to fix every data problem in your organization.