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by harperlee 3991 days ago
I would add a couple of things:

I'd like asserts / rules / invariants / constrains that alert me when they are no longer valid. Everyone implements this with conditional formatting to get them red.

Related, I don't like having three coding spaces: the cell value, the format formula, and possibly vba.

Also, the whole book/sheet/cell hierarchy is very limited. Complex formatting is complicated when a simple fix would do: just let me compose views of several sheets, so I can put tables side-by-side without the need for them to be aligned, break when I add columns to one table, etc. Support for tree-like structures is done typically by merging parent cells to span more. Just support trees as an alternative to tables! If the layout on point 3 would exist, this would be beautiful. A structure would be book/object-set-layout/cell, where objects can be: a tree, a table, etc. Formatting is part of an object and can be more easily templated, code is referenced, not created, in the objects, and is all apart - vba style. ResolverOne had this last one right. Having all code apart would mean easier version control, and easier separation of logic/presentation/data. Lastly, you could link objects from separate locations and authorization, and have a federated data model. But now I'm just overarchitecting :).