Honest comparisons
These are excellent tools. They solve a different problem — "how do I connect Excel to X?" Sparrow solves "how do I make every dataset look the same to Excel?" The short version:
| Product | The user thinks about |
|---|---|
| Power Query | tables |
| DuckDB add-ins | SQL |
| ODBC drivers | drivers |
| Market data terminals | the terminal |
| Sparrow | formulas |
Why not Power Query?
Power Query is Excel's built-in ETL. It's very good at importing and shaping a table once. It is not trying to be a live analytical workspace.
| I want to… | Power Query | Sparrow |
|---|---|---|
| Read Parquet from a local folder | ✓ | ✓ |
| Build formula-driven workbooks (data addressed by series, in cells) | ✗ (imports tables) | ✓ |
| Know, unattended, that the source has new data | ✗ | ✓ ribbon + per-column signals |
| See exactly which values were revised, with before/after | ✗ (full reload) | ✓ |
| Run the same workbook against local / NAS / URL / bucket / live server | ✗ (per-source queries) | ✓ change the Source |
| Continuous calendars with forward-fill, mixed-frequency synthesis | manual M code | ✓ built in |
| Analytics (stats, spreads, correlations, volatility) without a server | ✗ | ✓ offline |
Use Power Query when you want a one-off shaped import. Use Sparrow when the workbook is the application.
Why not DuckDB?
DuckDB is a superb analytical engine, and SQL-in-a-cell add-ins built on it are genuinely close cousins — for engineers. The difference is who the tool asks you to be.
| I want to… | DuckDB add-ins | Sparrow |
|---|---|---|
| Query local Parquet with full SQL | ✓ (their home turf) | ✗ by design — no SQL anywhere |
| Give analysts data without teaching SQL | ✗ | ✓ series IDs in formulas |
| A publisher contract (drop a file, it just works, with names/units) | ✗ (paths + schemas) | ✓ the open dataset format |
| Freshness & revision signals on the sheet | ✗ | ✓ |
| Same workbook from folder to live server | ✗ | ✓ |
If your team writes SQL fluently and wants ad-hoc queries, use DuckDB — sincerely. If your team lives in formulas, Sparrow is built for them.