A lot of slide rules have a bunch of scales but there are only a few you routinely use. Using a slide rule is very easy to pick up. That said, you do need to handle the order of magnitudes mentally and precision is necessarily limited.

And slide rules don't do addition or subtraction.

So they were useful in the absence of calculators as a way to avoid using log and trig tables but you wouldn't realistically use them in place of calculators today. (But then I think vinyl records are pretty silly too; and I say that as someone who grew up with them and actually owns a turntable.)