If your data consists of a long complicated pipeline, there might be some useful UX coming out of shader graphs systems from computer graphics. Shaders transform data in a functional way and you can build large graphs that also clearly show the inputs and outputs of a transformation. This might be easier to debug than a spreadsheet. Any point in the pipeline can be output to a visualizer in this way.
It would make debugging, understanding and inspecting the dataflow easier, but it would probably make browsing the output a bit harder so I can't say it's an obvious slam dunk. Might be interesting though.
I have just dabbled with Houdini and what you say (it is not exactly a shader but its procedural interface is probably similar to what you are saying) is spot-on.
Lots of data incoming, a graph of operations, lots of data (and plots, and what not) outgoing.
It would make debugging, understanding and inspecting the dataflow easier, but it would probably make browsing the output a bit harder so I can't say it's an obvious slam dunk. Might be interesting though.