Incidentally, the box with all the knobs is an art piece by Miller Levy, not a functional device. Here's the original.[1]
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Define-and-use-name...
That sounds like a big improvement on the model we all use every day: a 1D grid of editable memory locations without a[n inherent] type system.
Of course, what they're doing is programming, but the genius of spreadsheets is that it lets "non-programmers" program while hiding from them the fact that they're programming.
Improv was an attempt to redefine the way a spreadsheet program should work, to make it easier to build new spreadsheets and to modify existing ones. Conventional spreadsheets used on-screen cells to store all data, formulas, and notes. Improv separated these concepts and used the cells only for input and output data. Formulas, macros and other objects existed outside the cells, to simplify editing and reduce errors. Improv used named ranges for all formulas, as opposed to cell addresses.
A separate me product - power pivot does something like this - ms needs to add this as native functionality to Excel, since normal pivot tables are so unflexible, I never use them anymore.
There was a proposal to add user-defined table-based functions to Excel, by a group of authors including none other than Simon Peyton Jones, a major contributor to Haskell and GHC. Here's that paper: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/Papers...
Curiously, the paper is titled 'Improving the world's most popular functional language: user-defined functions in Excel'.
(And by the way, you can already name and refer to any range of cells in Excel, not just a row or a column. There's also a GUI dialog that lets you manage the names, e.g. rename, delete etc.)
The reason people reach for spreadsheets seems to be because they are visual. much like the register panel "blinkenlights" on early computers, spreadsheets allows someone to glance across and check the state of things.
And in an earlier discussion about this, someone pointed me to Apple's Numbers spreadsheet. There you can have multiple freely moveable and expandable sheets on screen at the same time, each addressable via its own name.