Unfortunately no.

Excel is hamstrung by having to maintain backwards compatibility for an endless number of hacks.

For instance, it is notorious that

0.1 + 0.2 != 0.3

in binary exponent floating point math. Excel does funny stuff with number formatting that hides this, but it is like having a bubble under a plastic sheet that moves someplace else when you push on it -- numeric strangeness appears in different places.

The right answer is to go to decimal exponent floating point math, but that is only HW accelerated on IBM Mainframes, maybe on RISC-V at some point. You'll probably crash Excel if you have enough numbers in it for performance to matter, but Microsoft would be afraid of any performance regression and it would break people's sheets so it won't happen.

On a technical basis we could use an Excel replacement that has some characteristics of Excel, and other characteristics of programming languages; one old software package to look to for inspiration is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TK_Solver

What makes it almost impossible to do on a marketing basis is that Excel is bundled into Microsoft Office so if you have an Office subscription you have Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Access, etc.

GP was about how Excel lacks "access control", "auditing", "change tracking". Then OP says it'll be easier to add those things to Excel than to make non-Excel suit the purpose.

Then you say no, backwards compatibility problems. But how does Excel's need for backward compatibility make it hard to add "access control", "auditing", or "change tracking"?

"access control" by definition means "make things not work some of the time"

Excel has change tracking, but like Jupyter notebooks and similar products it doesn't make the clean distinction between code and data that is necessary for it to be useful. (e.g. if I develop an analysis pipeline and use it for May 2019 it should be as easy as falling off a log to run it for June 2019)

To be fair in Javascript 0.1 + 0.2 === 0.3 also is false :). Not saying that Javascript is a great programming language.

It's a problem in all mainstream programming languages that Excel has a strange answer to.

The trouble with it is that it is a big distraction to the "non-professional programmer" who uses tools like Excel.

Yeah, that's the case for anything using IEEE 754 floating points.

"At its heart, VisiCalc is about numbers. One of the early decisions we made was to use decimal arithmetic so that the errors would be the same one that an accountant would see using a decimal calculator. In retrospect this was a bad decision because people turn out to not care and it made calculations much slower than they would have been in binary."

http://rmf.vc/implementingvisicalc

That sounds like you want to rebuild the whole paradigm of how 99% of software world treats numbers (which may be, at the end, a right thing to do but unlikely to happen at least in the near term) and you are laying the fault of it not happening at Excel's door. That would be very misplaced blame.

Why would anyone working with amounts in the millions or billions care about 0.1 + 0.2 != 0.3? Splitting hairs here I think.

Not so sure about that. We are possibly also talking about reports as in some other comments. Those might need to be exact. Very exact.