I have generated thousands of reports in the form of excel spreadsheets. Here are my biggest gripes

1. lack of good meta data so I can process spreadsheets after they have been reviewed. Right now I use named ranges with a keyword but its very limiting.

2. lack of a good build in scripting language that is easily to use, has good 3rd party libraries, and makes automation easy. I am not big on excel macros, it would be nice to have a lua or python built in as an addon.

3. difficult/not straight forward to interact with external data sources. It would be great if I could easily pull data in from a web service. I guess if #2 was there, this might be easier.