>One of Mehrotra’s chief frustrations with the older generation of documents was what he calls “the game of Battleship” — the need to describe rows and columns in formulas using headings like “A1 to F7,” as in the old board game. In Coda documents, rows and columns are named objects, making formulas both easier to read and write.
Lotus Improv from 1991 had "names" instead of rowcolumn coordinates. Quantrix from 2003 also has named "items" instead of rowcolumn coordinates. Neither product had widespread adoption.
It seems plausible that cryptic rowcolumns would be a major paint point for most Excel users but maybe it isn't.
Quantrix found a niche in financial modeling so maybe that domain of users (~50k users) value features like that enough to not use Excel.
Google Sheets continued the tradition of cryptic rowcols and has more adoption than either of those alternative products. (Probably because it costs $0.)
Lotus Improv from 1991 had "names" instead of rowcolumn coordinates. Quantrix from 2003 also has named "items" instead of rowcolumn coordinates. Neither product had widespread adoption.
It seems plausible that cryptic rowcolumns would be a major paint point for most Excel users but maybe it isn't.
Quantrix found a niche in financial modeling so maybe that domain of users (~50k users) value features like that enough to not use Excel.
Google Sheets continued the tradition of cryptic rowcols and has more adoption than either of those alternative products. (Probably because it costs $0.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv
[2] https://www.quantrix.com/QuantrixandExcelWhitePaper.pdf