One idea is to use columns instead of cells. Each column has a definition in terms of other columns which might also be defined in terms of other columns. If you change value(s) in some source column then these changes will propagate through the graph of these column definitions. Some fragments of this general idea were implemented in different systems, for example, Power BI or Airtable. The main difficulty in any formalization is how to deal with columns in multiple tables.

This approach was formalized in the concept-oriented model of data which relies on two basic elements: mathematical functions and mathematical sets. In contrast, most traditional data models rely on only sets. Functions are implemented as columns. This model gets rid of joins and groupby by making data processing simpler and more intuitive.

This approach was implemented in the Prosto data processing toolkit: https://github.com/asavinov/prosto