Numbers is actually the best spreadsheet for stuff where presentation matters. For example, me and my friends use it for our D&D (and invisible sun) character sheets - the formula language is powerful enough to do what we need, and its ability to manage multiple tables per sheet is uniquely powerful.
And the icloud version of Numbers is pretty handy when you don't have a Mac around (but the collaboration capabilities suck compared to Sheets).
Excel does support multiple tables per sheet through the format as table (?!) feature. But yeah, still hard to make those multiple Excel tables look good with sheet-wide column and row sizes.
I believe the Office-idiomatic approach there would be to create one Excel file containing multiple sheets, and then OLE-embed a view of each sheet into a Word (or Publisher) doc. Lets each tool do what it's good at.
And the icloud version of Numbers is pretty handy when you don't have a Mac around (but the collaboration capabilities suck compared to Sheets).