Back then their competition was Lotus 1-2-3. What they were showing was that they had some basic automation for some common tasks (autofill, auto calculations, auto formatting) while everyone who was coming from Lotus, their target customer, knew how manual and tedious this kind of thing was to do. Plus the UI in Lotus was only slightly less convoluted than Emacs.

The part they should have shown was how you could have large, complex (for the time) spreadsheets and not run out of memory which was a significant advantage they had back then as DOS applications had serious memory constraints even with extended memory. A lot of heavy spreadsheet users switched to Excel for that feature alone.