this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2024
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I know you’ve had a load of replies to this, but maybe. The issue is excel. People say libre office or web based Office365 can replace it, and it can for most basic spreadsheets, but there is no support for excel macros, additionally excel tables are not supported, and there is no powerquery equivalent which is a massive problem for sharing complex spreadsheets with others. I could not go without desktop excel for work. Libre office or web based office 365 doesn’t cut it.
Yeah unfortunately I'm going to be using excel a lot for my research
I think you can replace excel completely with combinations of a basic spreadsheet program like Libreoffice with other more powerful tools including python, Matlab, maple, SQL databases, rust (🦀) etc, but only if you never intend on working with another human or organisation again. Because ultimately you’ll need to send something to someone, and starting any email with “right, the instructions on opening/running this file: so first you’re going to need to install rust…” is in immediate non starter, and even if you can get round that, in return they’ll still send you some hideous spreadsheet with 3000 different vba functions and powerqueries of multiple databases and you haven’t a hope in hell of making that work outside of excel in any viable timeframe.
Excel is sadly the standard and it’s really powerful and a lot of people use that power. This means until something fully emulates all the functionality of excel (a moving target in itself) you’re stuck with using excel. Even though I'm on Linux 80% of the time, I have a windows machine for work that’s purpose is to run excel.