Alternatively, use Jupyter Notebooks & Pandas for this type of work. It has the same interactivity & visualization as Excel, but is far more powerful and you can reasonably move the code you create into your final product, rather than rewriting Excel formulas into a proper programming language.

I've heard that Airtable occupies a similar space, but I haven't used it enough to recommend it.

I'm not following. What good is it to have equivalent of "this.a=x.a this.b=x.b ..." in Excel, when what I need is to have this in code in my editor? Are you saying you use Excel to create the code, then copy/paste it into your editor? Or what?

I think the parent's using Excel essentially to do repeated template expansion: e.g. for a given set of member variable names ([a, b, c...]), give me the assignment statements I'd need to use those in a constructor.

Which I could do pretty trivially in Excel... but could also do trivially in about two lines of Python:

    vars = ["a", "b", "c"]
    statements = ["this.{0} = x.{0}".format(var) for var in vars]
    print(statements)

Spreadsheets can be an incredible tool-- as an interactive environment that allows non-programmers to express domain knowledge and quickly automate parts of their workflow, they're really unparalleled. But this isn't a very good example of something that Excel is particularly well-suited for.

Yeah you got my example.

But regarding your conclusion; my entire point is that it IS more useful than you might think. Disclaimer: I often use emacs e g regex-replace and other means of code generation as well, both a couple of internal dsls that I've built and directly one-off by programming (normally clojure).

To just expand on the code generation part: The fact that it is a large "cell based" structure means that I can move stuff around manually, quickly see the entire new structure, make overrides and so on. If I have some class that's supposed to match a csv with 80 fields, it's really hard to view that in any good way in source code.

I won't argue this with anyone, I realize many people vehemently hate spreadsheets, and Excel in particular, and disagrees with anything positive said about them. I'll just end with two final points.

1. The spreadsheet is a general purpose functional programming language with very large adoption and pretty much unseen "code editing" tools (outside of emacs), such as duplicate removal, sorting, user editable conditional formatting, and so on.

2. This was a tips on a tool to have in one's arsenal that is often overlooked, I wasn't looking for a debate.

Those can often be done in a decent text editor with regexp-like search and replace.

Took me 21 seconds with Emacs keyboard macros; no search and replace involved.