It's for advanced Excel users, they basically deal with the complexity of programming, just in their strange way, and I think it's a good way to reduce "Excel abuse".
Kind of like “what would you do for the excel abuse case in an environment not tied down by decades of legacy compat?"
That was my first impression (seeing this for the first time today). In an "all built on top of js" world you might just make a snapshot of the entire stack (except for the "browser substitute") part of the document. Make "open new document" essentially the equivalent of github fork from an ever evolving "the empty document" template. You might see quite an impressive reward from moving fast and breaking things instead of sticking to the paradigm of eternal 20th century compatibility.
My wife is a goddess of "Excel abuse". She (a financial analyst) unearths and uses the kinds of features in Excel I didn't know existed. But she can't code and isn't interested in learning how to do so. It's a different mindset entirely. I think MS is blindsided by having so many programmers around that 99% of the people out there aren't anything like engineers in terms of their mindset, let alone programmers. To those folks all this "accessing of properties" might as well be some inscrutable alien language.
That was my first impression (seeing this for the first time today). In an "all built on top of js" world you might just make a snapshot of the entire stack (except for the "browser substitute") part of the document. Make "open new document" essentially the equivalent of github fork from an ever evolving "the empty document" template. You might see quite an impressive reward from moving fast and breaking things instead of sticking to the paradigm of eternal 20th century compatibility.