I mostly prefer not to be restricted by rows and columns, and like the visibility of object browsers and inspectors.
I'm not sure what problem you try to solve here.
- a smalltalk environment is a much more powerful modeling environment than a spreadsheet, and much easier to use for complex models. There you might want a rows-and-columns based viewer. Glamour provides solutions to easily build browsers. It is part of Moose.
- spreadsheets are fine for prototyping small models, but have serious shortcomings in production environments: testability, multi-user support, performance.
- in production environments much simpler grids are more often used.
A smalltalk environment should be learned while pair-programming a few hours with an expert. The way to use it is very different from using IDEs like Eclipse, Visual Studio, XCode or Delphi.
If you want to sift through a lot of data, and find the interesting objects, Moose offers a lot of help in visualizing your data. It is focused on software reengineering, but e.g. Mondrian is just as usable for financial data.
