Let's approach Milo's concern to eventually use Excel as Milo's analysis tool
however correct (also IMO) to store the large volume of data into a database
server e.g. SQL. Thus, Milo, to answer your question if analysis of data is
feasible in Excel: Yes. The big BUT however is the solution to provide
implementation of directly reading the data from a source SQL data server by
your Excel application.
That said, it wouldn't be a big But but a smaller one then. You may use the
data connectivity tools of Excel to data server SQL. In Excel, press F1
(help) then type to search keyword ODBC connectivity.
Good luck.

"Milo" wrote:

Hi,
I wonder if Excel is the right app for this. I'll try and be brief.

I have some aircraft data: latitude, logitude, height, time/date and a
crucial number called vertical acceleration in m/s (call it VA). I have this
data for 40 aircraft spanning 10 years and so the number of these records is
several million.

Now, I would like to set up a multidimensional structure where I can view
histograms of VA for any height band (say 9000 to 10000 feet) for any
month/year for any aircraft for a particular latitude/longitude square (say 2
x 2 degrees).
I was thinking in terms of multiple workbooks (one for each aircraft) and
multiple sheets in each workbook, a sheet one for each month where each sheet
would contain lat/lon height columns and rows would contain numbers of VA
occurances from which the VA histograms could be built.
How fast would such a structure be if I wanted to sum over several years for
a particular number of aircraft for a given height band, month and location
and come up with a histogram?
Put simply is this feasible in Excel?
Any suggestions welcome, Milo.