I think the problem now is not a better excel but a better access; spreadsheets are pretty good at what they do but biz people use them when they should use a database because they find databases less intuitive.
I would argue that the major benefits that a database offers over Excel is data integrity and consistency. I think the lack of that sort of constraint is a major aspect of what drives 'biz' people to spreadsheets.
Instead the sheet is both layout tool and data "meaning" in one glob of garbage.
Apple tried to solve the issue with "Numbers" but ymmv on how well.
"Data laid out on a grid" is a paradigm that applies to a wide range of problems and spreadsheets are pretty much the only tool around that can deal with that entire paradigm. The user isn't stupid. The user has a use case that isn't being catered to.
This is probably a glass half full/empty at the end of the day.
Fact is spreadsheets don't scale because they are sloppy and they don't provide a clean coherent path to getting the user to scale themselves into a sql like solution.
Oh well.
Excel's tables are probably similar what you mean, but Microsoft rightly allow them as elements on each sheet rather than basing the sheet around one table.
Your "tiny subset" is your confusion at not seeing numbers I suspect.
Wikipedia actually does a decent job of trying to describe the philosophy.
Excel has Tables, which sort serve a similar purpose, but the sheet itself is a flexible grid with no pre-conceived purpose, which makes it much more flexible than Numbers.
For example, it's relatively easy to knock up a simple Gantt chart by directly coloring cells, something that I've seen often. And you could argue that it's not the best tool for the job, and you'd be right, but it's easy and does the job well enough in many cases.
And that's why it's popular and iWork isn't. Numbers concentrated on making charts and tables beautiful; Excel is a general-purpose programmable platform.
For the past few years an easy-to-use database interface for small businesses has been my primary idea of what I'd like to build if I founded a startup.
DabbleDB was a good one for individual users, until Twitter bought it and shut it down. Google says grovesite.com is a competitor... and I also think Dabble's founders were debating rewriting it.
There's always the old FileMaker Pro, or databases of that age / time. (4D??)
you should definitely try to give it a go.
Google Sheets is laughably primitive when you try to use it as a multiuser database. It's impossible to validate input and preserve structure (giving a user edit permission, so they can insert new data, also allows them to remove cell validation and destroy the structure of the spreadsheet). Something as simple as copy-and-paste (Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V) will destroy all of your carefully placed conditional formatting and validation constraints. And sometimes a formula will just "break" for no reason at all, only to start working again a few days later...
I'm honestly surprised that this is what we consider to be the start of the art. Where's my easy-to-use cloud database?
The modern java version can access databases. A spreadsheet user could get up and running with it over the course of a week or two, then switch to a database behind the scene.
I dream in build a moder relational language, but then I don't have the resources for doing it... However I still do some code/meditation about it each week...