I was helping my bartender friend with a spreadsheet for his per-bottle profits, and it would have been so much simpler if we could have named the columns after each liquor, and the rows for their wholesale-cost, serving-size, bottle-size, serving-charge, etc.

You can do that with Excel 2007+ with tables, which are probably one of the best improvements in Excel in a long time, and underused because so many Excel users have spent so much time learning how to work without them they failed to notice that it was no longer necessary, and that the most common Excel use cases had just gotten much easier.