I'm certain that, if someone came up with a workable replacement for Excel, then it would have a market in academia. (Would it earn the creator promotions? I think clickbait-y titles are more likely, not less, to get promotions.) I base this largely on the success of TeX in the hard sciences, which, by and large, won't touch Word unless absolutely forced to do so. (At least, that's how it is in math.) This is rather ahistorical, since TeX actually predates Word, but I still believe it.