Speaking of automatic cell names ‘A1’, the other thing I prefer about Numbers is that you can name columns and use the name in formulas. For example, you might have a table “Sales” with columns “Item”, “Number Sold”, “Item Price”, and “Total”. The formula for all cells in column “Total” is
=‘Item Price’ * ‘Num Sold’
Instead of =B1C1, =B2C2, etc. You’re doing something similar with the name cell, but with separate tables you can designate column headers and row headers, and use them to reference cells. For example, in another table you might say: =SUM(‘Sales :: Total’) to sum up column “Total” in table “Sales”.
(I might be getting the syntax wrong here, you don’t type this in, you “option-click” on the cell you want to reference and it inserts the reference.)
This is optional, you can still do A1, B4, etc and sometimes that’s what you get when you use the same name for two columns in order to disambiguate. But in general it makes it easier validate your spreadsheet, I think.
I believe the approach to naming goes back to Lotus
Improv: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv
I think Quantrix Modeler is also based on the ideas of Improv.
Come to think of it, there was Javelin in the 1980, that you might find interesting. It’s not a spreadsheet but it was used for financial modeling and time series: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javelin_Software
But those are quite far departures and might not be where you want to go. I just wanted to point them out in case you hadn’t heard of them. (I’ve only heard of them but I have never used them, so I cannot say how good or bad they worked in daily life.)