Why? Excel is ubiquitous, powerful, and accessible. It only really falls apart for huge data sets -- at which point you build a cluster and feed the output back into Excel anyway.
I'll never understand why software engineers feel like everybody else is a caveman banging rocks together. Excel replacements are a hard sell because, by and large, they're not needed.
I work on a desk which has a lot of vital calculations in Excel spreadsheets. They work, and we make money, but it takes a lot of human effort (expensive trader effort!) to keep them working properly. If we want to scale up - more people, more products, etc - we need to move more and more of those calculations into software.
Improvements to or replacements for the spreadsheet as tools for non-programmers would certainly be helpful. But better tools and techniques for programmers to port functionality from spreadsheets to 'real' software would also be helpful.
Straddling the line between 'technically best outcome' and 'cheapest workable outcome' is what businesses strive to do. In most mature businesses change should be approached extremely cautiously; everybody loves changing things and the costs are frequently big.
The big grid of cells is the weakest part of Excel by far!
As someone that spent years being buried in complex spreadsheets for hours a day (and supported and trained others who spent literally 12 hours a day building models), I can't think of a better combination of functionality, capability, and usability than that big grid of cells.
Then we move on to math, and we still do it with paper, almost as an extension of writing. When doing calculations in class it is natural to keep calculations and values in some type of invisible grid pattern that makes sense to the student. Then we get to the computer, and that format still follows.
Except that the first information processing a person does isn't reading at all. It's learning sounds and words, and we do that by listening and watching others do it. And the first thing we create isn't words on a page, it's likely something physical, in the form of building blocks or some other toy. This type of learning is great, but it can't be replicated well in a school system because it is expensive and doesn't scale well to the real world. If you're going to engineer and design a bridge, you're not going to start by making a bridge. So we're taught to make lines on paper that represent a bridge.
This is where (I hope) AR/VR becomes disruptive. An infinite amount of objects that can represent any piece of data on any scale in non space.
Think about how successful minecraft is. When I first played it made me realize how much creativity I had lost to pen and paper through no fault of my own. I was building logic gates without even realizing what formal logic was until I came to college.
Now make it engulf me, make it blank, and give me a wand and an in game terminal.
Since this thread probably has more Finance users than usual - most people have seen a bloomberg terminal. Its ugly, and filled with arcane short cuts.
Its extremely extremely good at getting its job done, and keyboard short cuts and commands are the fastest system once you gain expertise.
Keyboard short cuts and memorized lists of invocations will regularly be the fastest way of activating commands on a system for experts. Especially once it becomes muscle memmory.
For most abstract symbol manipulation, most jobs can get away with a stack of 2D pages.
If you are working in 3D, then you are doing a pretty unique set of modifications, and the average case will not apply to you.
Which is to say that AR VR will be only for a very niche set of uses.
Operators are so in tuned with the incoming data that they intuitively make 3D maps in their head, while requiring 2D data for quick observation, comprehension, and real-time monitoring.
Working in a 3D space makes sense for blocking out movies, exploring physical architectures, or certain kinds of research. For everything else there universe has given us an amazing parallel processor connected to eyes that work really nicely on tabular data.
If something comes out that can help students who struggle with math visualize those concepts in a more (to them) natural way I will be thrilled. To me these concepts were always very visual, and allowed me to pick up concepts in class by thinking that way. I only have experience in the U.S. education system, and in my experience it felt that my teachers always taught in a way that emphasized problem memorization and notation over actually understanding, mentally, the abstract concepts and problem solving. This seems like a barrier for the average student, and leaves a lot of people feeling left behind or "not smart" even though it is likely a fault in the way they are taught.
If something comes out that will allow those mental barriers to be broken, I will consider it a win.