Ask HN: What are alternative ways of visualizing and managing tabular data?

One of the functionalities of our application is the management of what we call parameters or entities. There are different entity types and they can have relationships between each other. Typically there are a lot of entities (rows) per entity type, and there also a lot of keys (columns). The way we addressed this visually is by allowing the user to manage cells in a row/column or tabular based approach. Think of it as a big excel file, with each sheet representing a certain entity and then relationships are created using key/foreign keys. I am thinking however that this is not the optimal ways of managing parameters, and want to try to think out of the box a bit. What are some of your thoughts/ideas on how to approach this problem?