Yes, I think maybe the original VisiCalc was elegant, even if far less featureful. It was a game-changer, one of the first general purpose PC applications that let users do row/column based computing without programming, and along with word processing was the software that underpinned the explosion of PC use in business.
I taught Lotus 1-2-3 for a while, so probably had well above average familiarity with it.
And then in 1987, I opened Excel 1.0 on a Mac SE for the first time. Was blown away at how elegant that felt. Later versions seemed to loose that original elegance as features were added.
