Excel is a general-purpose programming environment, it has a full programming language inside it (VBA) with the ability to call out to the operating system and load functionality through DLLs.
No, the way to tame Excel is to make it less general, to impose principles of structured programming on it. Separate code and data and presentation. Put some of the data in a database. Impose types on it, so Excel doesn't interpret genomes as dates etc. Make the control and data flow visible. Split it into pieces with defined responsibilities.
Excel is really a "two dimensional assembler": you put an operation in each cell, and they can read any other cell, and it all executes together.
In my first job out of Uni I wrote some VBA to make requests to the "online diary" to pull out some of the information into some template Excel files we had to create.
Some poor soul is probably still maintaining that.
No, the way to tame Excel is to make it less general, to impose principles of structured programming on it. Separate code and data and presentation. Put some of the data in a database. Impose types on it, so Excel doesn't interpret genomes as dates etc. Make the control and data flow visible. Split it into pieces with defined responsibilities.
Excel is really a "two dimensional assembler": you put an operation in each cell, and they can read any other cell, and it all executes together.