Sounds to me like something like Honeycode is exactly what is needed then, as a replacement for Excel in a business context. It is yet to be seen of course whether or not they can achieve this, or just replace one unwieldy mess for another.
Disclaimer: Which is why I am working on https://stitchiq.com/
I've been positively suprised that Microsoft seems to have started to finally improve this situation with things like XLOOKUP and increasing Python support in Excel.
Disclaimer: I've published in a group doing research on Spreadsheet improvements, this is the professor's publication history [2]
[1] http://www.eusprig.org/horror-stories.htm [2] https://www.felienne.com/publications
Thanks for the link to your publication, will give it a read.
Spreadsheets are a great tool that allows people to leverage computers without knowing how to code, but they can easily get awful to debug. Even excluding stuff like VBA; which is code, but gets included via google-driven copy/paste development.
For example, excel formulas from other sheets can modify cells in the existing sheet. This modification can be logically driven from changes in a 3rd sheet. So cell 1 in sheet A gets modified for some reason when something changes in sheet C. Formulas in sheet B are changing these values, but good luck figuring out that. Breakpoints aren't really an excel thing, debugging complicated sheets is very hard. Unfortunately, most of these sorts of files aren't available online, as they are viewed as the 'secret sauce' for the businesses using them.
Your landing page is too few on details, so maybe you have solved this problem, but from your comment it seems that you haven't had to approach it from this angle. Trust me, businesses run critical decisions on excel sheets with creation dates in the early 2000's, and the amount of tweaking can turn them into behemoths. That is why the low/no-code solutions scare me- easy to start doesn't mean that you won't have an unsolvable hairball in 5 years.
I have yet to hit the issues per se, but what I am partially betting on, is that once spreadsheets are just an interface rather than datastore (where possible), some of those issues can be resolved. One will loose realtime reactivity, but what they were trying to achieve anyway was to access a "canonical" data point.
I should have a video and more details on the website in a day or two
