> I'd love to see a sort of hypercube model that also had the ability to perform better database-style summarizing. Pivot tables with more dimensions and power,

> I'd love to see a sort of hypercube model that also had the ability to perform better database-style summarizing. Pivot tables with more dimensions and power, perhaps. I'd say the recent data analysis tools based on notebooks and data lakes satisfy those requirements. A library like Pandas provides the cube programming model of data dimensions, a column-oriented database like Hadoop gives you efficient storage, and a Jupyter notebook is the user-friendly GUI. It's certainly more complex than a spreadsheet, but the code parts may be encapsulated to not scare your users.