I think Excel fails when it comes to other natural types of data such as trees, graphs, even arrays or records. It’s terrible at all of them. It’s not relational, and it’s not inductive, has no sum types, or anything.

What it is, is a very good UI to throw tabular data into and modify.

I have a post about it here: https://inflex.io/blog/whats-wrong-with-the-grid