1. Powerful keyboard-based navigation/manipulation will be extremely helpful.
2. RDBMS-style tuples seem weird to me; why not objects? Quite natural to a layperson, IMO. If a "cell" can hold an object ({name: "Brown shoes", price: { amount: 254, currency: "USD"}} rather than just a scalar value like $2.54) a spreadsheet can be a lot more powerful.
Take a look at http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.113.... . Object databases, XML databases and network databases were around long before relational databases. The key problem the relational databases solved is not having to bake the access paths into your data-structure.
With a sufficiently rich type system (with composites and sets as domains), there's not a lot of difference when you are talking about pure data (instead of how the data structure relates to behavior) between tuples and objects.
1. Powerful keyboard-based navigation/manipulation will be extremely helpful.
2. RDBMS-style tuples seem weird to me; why not objects? Quite natural to a layperson, IMO. If a "cell" can hold an object ({name: "Brown shoes", price: { amount: 254, currency: "USD"}} rather than just a scalar value like $2.54) a spreadsheet can be a lot more powerful.