Is there any spreadsheet which use a formula repository instead of writing several copies directly in the cell?

Question

I like speradsheet programs, but there is a disturbing thing with them: the formulas must be entered in the cells. It has several withdraws:

• I need to scan thru all the cells to see, what's going in a sheet;
• if I change a formula, I must copy it to several cells;
• of course, sometimes I forget copy new formulas into all the cells;
• it eats up lot of space, the same long formula is repeated several times.

Have you ever seen a spreadsheet software which has a kind of formula repository? Does it exists?

(I'm working now on a spreadsheet software, which is more specialized than desktop spreadsheets, and I'm using one formula per row - that's where the question comes.)

Also, spreadsheets are dataflow systems, and it's strange, that there are no pre-made reusable components, which is the base concept of dataflow systems. In spreadsheets, all components are used once, which is very bad design.

Answer 1

Lotus Improv did this.

Answer 2

Since Office 2007, MS Excel has supported named formulae, which can be held at workbook- or worksheet- level, and can subsequently be used in many cells.

See this link or this for an explanation

Answer 3

Take a look at http://www.fast-standard.org/ and be prepared to be amazed at how powerful and easy Excel is when used following a focussed methodology.

Answer 4

Microsoft Excel allows Visual Basic for Applications that can do exactly this. You write code that can scan all the cells and run formulas on them.