I was toying with this idea in the past, where cells would support, in addition to primitives(numbers, strings, whatever) and functions, a new type which would be identified by a reverse domain name notation path/key (e.g org.hr.employees.cnt), and optionally a comma separated (key-value) pairs as arguments.

Whenever a value for such a unique (key, arguments) cell would be required, the application would collect all such that need updates -- or, you could click a button to update them all --, create a message that would contain all paths and arguments, and auth info (each user would require to authenticate with some centralized system, so that the auth key would be used for that RPC, and that the service could check for authentication and authorization ), call out to some service and get values for each of those cells (value could depend on the authenticated user, or could even be denied depending on privileges ).

Furthermore, the application would cache each such cell value (auth key, resource path, arguments digest, value) and it would periodically update them, or do so on demand (so that you can use it say on a plane, and refresh them when you land). That’s the gist of it, but there’s more to it and there are some optimization opportunities I am ignoring here, but it could work.

Then again, for all I know, there are already such services, or apps that kind of do this sort of thing.