[peatmoss]

I agree that purpose-specific tools aren't the answer, unless the question was, "can I have a straight jacket?"

Flip side, my feeling is that, if an analysis was worth doing, it's probably worth doing right. And to do it right, it should probably be done in a way that one can show their work. I like where the R community in particular has gone in dropping the barrier to reproducible analysis to roughly the same place as Excel.

[Jesus_Jones]

My friend's startup has a project that matches up with a lot of these requirements, called Coda. It's easy to query data and build visualizations, has a spreadsheet data model, and has an easier programming model. Excel did a great job getting people to "program" their spreadsheets though.

I also wonder about google sheets capabilities. It does work so well for many people working on one spreadsheet, except for undo. The major flaw I've seen is undo, because in google sheets it was global undo, not personal undo.