Disagree with the premise. Excel is a great product because it's so flexible. The same product that financiers use to create valuation models can be used by your mum to create a grocery list, or your small business to create an invoice. A spreadsheet is a blank canvas which can be used to create pretty much anything, and doesn't force the user to use it for a single use case or in one specific way.

Interesting. Sounds a bit like this: www.thelogicalbox.com Also a little like http://www.sumwise.com/

>“It’s really easy to build charts in Excel. But it’s really hard to get the data in the right format to do that,”

This is a famous spreadsheet problem. The only solutions I have seen are a bit like SQL. Hope you find a better way.

Err ... my interest: I am also working on a spreadsheet based startup, a web app builder for spreadsheet users.

Good luck, hope you add a solution or two to our world.