Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?

Decent looking plots.

If I'm going to make a scatter plot style plot for anything besides an internal memo (even an internal presentation) I always plot with something else.

I'm exactly the opposite of your target audience with this question, but hopefully I can give a useful response anyway :)

I know almost nothing about Excel and it's a deficiency I feel quite keenly. The program is almost completely undiscoverable to me and I don't even know where to start with it. I know that there are powerful uses and features of Excel but the model (or at least the bits of it I've been exposed to) hasn't clicked for me yet.

I suspect I'm not alone in my bafflement; maybe there is the possibility this new spreadsheet could be useful to us Excel-ignorant customers who nonetheless want access to the benefits of this class of software.

As a hacker and programmer who is comfortable with all sorts of paradigms I feel really strange admitting this weakness but I suspect that I'm not the only one who is in this boat.

Sharepoint is fine if you are only tacking things at the file level. You can't answer stuff like "who changed the formula in E5?" Or even "how long has the formula in E5 been wrong?"

Some kind of auditability of Excel spreadsheets would save enormous amouns of money and time.

I would like to have mind mapping (like http://www.mindjet.com/) right inside excel (as well as for other office applications) but it should be tightly integrated. It seems to me such type functionality might be useful for data crunching and modeling with full brain thinking. Spreadsheets enable only logical half of brain so there is room for improvement.

You can diff two versions against each other.

Of course it's not as nice as "blame", which I think is what you want here?