Excel's cramped formula bar that defaults to one line is, to borrow a turn of phrase from Raskin, not at all something that is necessary—it is merely customary.

Excel's cramped formula bar that defaults to one line is, to borrow a turn of phrase from Raskin, not at all something that is necessary—it is merely customary. There's no (good) reason that when you start to type a formula or you click on a cell that has a formula already in it that Excel doesn't make an ephemeral sidebar overlay appear with an 80-column text editor in it. There's no good reason that it doesn't run a gofmt-style code prettifier on long, sprawling formulae. There's no good reason that clones like Google Docs don't do this, either. The best time would have been when we transitioned to widescreens. Spreadsheet programming is bad because neither Microsoft nor its competitors actually care about making it good.