manual J program

Using an .ods file extension, and other clues in your post, it seems that you might be wanting this to be usable across multiple spreadsheet platforms (Excel, LO Calc, Apache Calc, others). If this is true, then I think you will want to avoid VBA, because relying on VBA macros will pretty much lock you into Excel only. IMO, if you want the broadest compatibility across spreadsheet platforms, you need to avoid any macro language and try to program the spreadsheet using only spreadsheet formulas (being aware of which formulas are universally available and which are not). Once you start writing macros (in whatever language you choose to write them), you make cross-platform compatibility more difficult.

If you decide that you do need to move some of the programming to other languages, you might consider languages like javascript over VBA. Most spreadsheets have support for javascript as a macro language (Google sheets might only support javascript as a macro language).

All of that assumes that cross spreadsheet compatibility is important. If not, then we can work on an Excel specific application, but it's probably important to decide just how important cross platform compatibility is to your project, before we start proposing solutions that will only work in Excel.