It is definitely not my point that Spolsky's role with Excel was unimportant. Hopefully, none of my comments can be taken as minimizing his role at all. I'm just saying he wasn't an Excel dev lead, which is a distinction that is relevant to this thread.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
tl;dr He wrote the spec for VBA, aka Excel Macros. It's not being in charge of all of Excel, but I would call that a pretty substantial contribution.