I don't need a spreadsheet that much, but I've been finding MS Office 365 version of Excel to be obnoxious to use. They've changed a lot since I used it 5 or 10 years ago. I don't need it enough to learn it, so I've just been using Google Sheets as needed.

In the browser the google office suite absolutely beats microsoft’s, even after years of benign neglect by google. Comparing the desktop microsoft apps vs the google web apps I would say the microsoft stuff is more fully featured, but slow and more confusing to use.

Honestly? you might be right.

Perhaps Airtable for an aaS approach that can be exposed to external visitors as a website, but the concept is sound.

How do you feel about Airtable's recent pricing changes?

I think Airtable would make a reasonable admin backend for a custom site/application, as the admin backend is usually the bit of the system that gets the least UX love, and it's close enough to a spreadsheet that it shouldn't be too hard for people to pick up.

No, you're actually right.

This, but I also have a wishlist of features I wish Excel had in order to achieve parity with Airtable/Notion – arbitrarily-sized lists of data in a cell, for one (as opposed to arrays splatted throughout multipel cells.)