[hnlmorg]

> For example, Excel would be a lot more usable and maintainable for me if there was a way to make a special "data sheet" in which data types are forced to be consistent within columns and there was a concept of column names.

You can already do both of those in Excel:

- data types: https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/apply-data-valida... (though you'd also need to lock the spreadsheet as otherwise someone could remove the validation on the cells)

- column naming: https://smallbusiness.chron.com/give-name-columns-excel-7344... (you can name individual cells and ranges too. Which means you can actually start to write formulas that look more like C with name variables, very loosely speaking of course)

There's a surprising amount of hidden functionally in Excel. Personally I think that while ribbon bar might have made core features a lot easier for some, it's made a lot of the more advanced tools harder to discover.