The main reason there's nothing better is just that everyone is using ms office.
Nothing is more compatible with ms office than ms office.
But in terms of features it's not really any different than office 2000. The ribbons were introduced and Excel sheets can be bigger but it's really just the same. There's hardly been any innovation. That's what Microsoft do when they own a market, they just sit back. It happened to internet explorer and it happened to office.
Anyone else would have made a better product if it weren't a non-starter.
As an example: in my job Excel is not used for numbers but abused as a database. It really deeply sucks at that, you need to copy paste vlookups and it chokes on a few hundred thousand rows. On a modern computer that's ridiculous. It doesn't enforce type integrity and sometimes people type over vlookups breaking the formula in that row.
"Formatting as table" is a bit of a workaround and changes a lot more than just "formatting" implies. But it doesn't solve the core issue which is that this is just the wrong tool for the job, period. It just smoothes over some of the ridiculous workarounds.
Any company that cared would either make it do databases better, or would find out why users don't grok the actual database product, ms access, and keep abusing a spreadsheet for this purpose. They would improve the database product so it would be great to use. And port it to all platforms, ms never bothered to port it to Mac.
Access is difficult because it's too closely tied to SQL concepts. And thus a complex 70s mindset hell bent on minimising data storage. This could be so greatly reinvented, wouldn't necessarily have to be an RDBMS. The only reason people screw around with excel is because they know it. Not because it's actually good for this purpose.
Another example: they never fixed the CSV-semicolon issue outside of the US or the ambiguity of translated function names.