It's good that you've made this realisation, and I wish you luck on your way forward. But maybe you should even go one step further and, instead of doing spreadsheet programming, use a proper database as your backend data storage, and only use spreadsheets as your input/output/report format.

This obviously depends on what exactly you're doing, but I have found that a lot of the things people do with spreadsheets are actually better and easier to do if you're not tied to the simple grid table-format and have a relational database as your data store. Moving from one concept to the other can be a real eye-opener as well. Just a thought.