I've been thinking about this a ton lately -
I think the holy grail is something that extends the spreadsheet UX with the capability to address much larger data sets, roughly equivalent in power to a Jupyter notebook.
This probably means constraining some of the totally free-form data entry and imposing some kind of discipline onto columns? As well as some way to intuitively group together groups of cell-level formulas into a logical "row", and describe row-level operations, with some kind of rough type checking or duck typing?
But you might want to still retain an ability to lay out the result of computations free-form for invoice and other reporting uses that Excel is still great for?
Better graphical visualization would be nice too and I think that's actually in reach - there are great open source options like vegalite and apache echarts that open up a lot of possibilities for new tools.
This probably means constraining some of the totally free-form data entry and imposing some kind of discipline onto columns? As well as some way to intuitively group together groups of cell-level formulas into a logical "row", and describe row-level operations, with some kind of rough type checking or duck typing?
But you might want to still retain an ability to lay out the result of computations free-form for invoice and other reporting uses that Excel is still great for?
Better graphical visualization would be nice too and I think that's actually in reach - there are great open source options like vegalite and apache echarts that open up a lot of possibilities for new tools.