> I'd love to see an Excel designed-from-scratch that scratches the same itches of approachability and user-friendliness but with an awareness of Excel's failings and without obsessing over the spreadsheet metaphor. Something in-between Excel and Access.

I proposed this idea once during a job interview; data analysts were using Excel to model data for providing short term financing. I proposed a web-based system that allowed users to share formulas over large datasets; datasets large enough that you wouldn't materialize them in spreadsheets (dropping the spreadsheet metaphor mentioned above).