To be honest: Is there an alternative?
I've been looking for a spreadsheet so that I can "drive spreadsheet from Python" rather than the usual "drive Python from spreadsheet".
As far as I can tell, that doesn't exist.
There are read-only variants to analyzed tabular data, but there seem to be none that allow me to do lots of editing in a visual way.
I once wrote a small app to add up all shared expenses among a group of roommates and calculate how much each owed the others. It pulled together rent (recurring), various utilities (from my gmail) and one-off shared expenses (e.g. toilet paper) from a Google form/spreadsheet, added in any money owed from the prior month and generated a nice report, in what ended up being 100-200 lines of code after a few years of living together.
The killer feature was their APIs, where microsoft still sucks.
We could show them that if you put the data in sheets we could mount it from bigquery and process it from there. Or load it from a notebook.
This created a good-enough hybrid solution where spreadsheets could interact with code.
Key word there is low-stakes. I think Excel gets a lot of heat because it's often found used in contexts where it's wholly inappropriate to use (eg driving critical production decisions from SalesAnalysis_JimVersion_v1.8_FINAL.xlsx). That's not really Excel's fault.
See https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/in...
You might find Mito [https://www.trymito.io/] interesting. I haven’t really used it myself, but it sounds like what you’re looking for.