If it is not a programming language, you cannot do everything you can possibly think of and you would be restricted. But people _want_ to do what they have in

If it is not a programming language, you cannot do everything you can possibly think of and you would be restricted. But people _want_ to do what they have in mind, so they will work around the tool in some way. Either by employing a mechanism to still make the tool do what they want (e.g. macros in Excel) or by using another tool that fills the gap. In case 1 you now have the worst of both worlds and in case 2 you now have X tools with all the problems that a zoo of tools brings. If, on the other hand, you _can_ describe every business rule that you can think of in that tool, then it _is_ a programming language. There is no requirement for a programming language to use text. See scratch lang for example.