In my not-so-professional opinion, IR and Raman spectrography could give us something. Or density, depending on how selectively the industrialized mechanical processes are at resolving small changes in physical properties.
So, from my previous career working with spreadsheets, I've noticed that most aberrant behaviors in Excel are easily circumvented through slightly-above average features the average user just isn't aware of.
It's been a while, but for example name-mangling can be circumvented by prefacing an entry with a single quote (analogous to how the r character raw string marker is used in Python). You can probably also change the automatic type coercion, buried somewhere in the settings, since adding that single quote prior to the string mangling might be difficult in Excel. (But data entry is often manually done anyways with these kinds of setups.)
Usually in cases like these, the problem is that the user isn't aware of the feature they need to solve the problem they're having. (Granted, Excel's whole appeal is easy onboarding for non-technical users.) Save for obvious limitations like data size or overly intricate business logic better suited for an actual language, Excel is well-suited for a broad range of business and academic use cases.