Aim for a front end notebook interface like Jupyter or Mathematica. Most excel i've had to play with was to store/manipulate data _and then_ C&P charts or data to word for the report. Seriously, notebooks.
You can basically use Jupyter as a frontend to Excel now anyway and never need to open Excel except to read and write to Excel files that you are sharing with Excel users.
that's cool - hadn't realised. i still dream about a word-excel mashup. imagine a table in word that when you click on it revolves around to reveal a spreadsheet and you hook the 'other side' to the calculation cells. literally separate data and text/analysis but packaged as a unit.