Microsoft very nearly made this back in 1990, with their Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) [1] technology, in Windows 3.1 and MS Office. From the name OLE, I

Microsoft very nearly made this back in 1990, with their Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) [1] technology, in Windows 3.1 and MS Office. From the name OLE, I envisaged a Word doc with multiple embedded Excel tables, with calculations in one table used to drive those in another, and Word formulae able to include any Excel table/cell value. In practice, anything complicated caused the compound document to freeze up or not update. My "half way house" to that vision of arbitrary tables would been a traditional Excel worksheet with a UI able to be "cut" horizontally so that different row ranges could choose their own column widths. A kind of step-sister to the Freeze Rows command. The A1:B2-style cell references would still cover the whole worksheet. Just now each section could pick their own column widths. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding