It can be better. I am no mac user but from what I have seen, Apple's excel competitor has this concept that instead of an excel tab being a single grid, it is a canvas on which you can add tables, charts, etc. As a fairly advanced excel user, this makes so much more sense than Excel's approach.

VBA is kind of a wart in Office, hasn't been updated since 1998. They made an attempt of integrating a mini visual studio in Office with C#/VB.net (VSTA), then killed it.

I see many no code alternative poping up (Microsoft power suite, alteryx, etc). But all have a pretty steep learning curve, and frankly the people who are willing to invest the time to learn them migh as well pick up SQL or even python for the same effort.