[projektfu]

I'd love to see a sort of hypercube model that also had the ability to perform better database-style summarizing. Pivot tables with more dimensions and power, perhaps.

I might be an idiot, and it might all be obvious in some way, but everything I try to do in excel is about 80% easy and the remaining 20% is hard because a lack of power in excel's formula language. From no-brainers like fixing strings to various things we take for granted elsewhere in programming, like our own defined functions. Sure, if you extend excel, you get some of it, but it should be able to do those things without dropping to VBA or add-ins. Meanwhile, its default functionality leaves a lot to be desired, especially quirks like how it interprets numbers, dates and strings.

I feel like I can explain to someone how to copy and paste things in excel so that formulas get applied, but having to teach them PowerQuery is beyond my ken.

[TuringTest]

> I'd love to see a sort of hypercube model that also had the ability to perform better database-style summarizing. Pivot tables with more dimensions and power, perhaps.

I'd say the recent data analysis tools based on notebooks and data lakes satisfy those requirements. A library like Pandas provides the cube programming model of data dimensions, a column-oriented database like Hadoop gives you efficient storage, and a Jupyter notebook is the user-friendly GUI.

It's certainly more complex than a spreadsheet, but the code parts may be encapsulated to not scare your users.