What can be a good alternative for Excel that works on Linux? Currently I need to use VBA, Solver, Analysis Toolpak charts. Moreover the alternative should read xls and xlsx files. Doesn’t need to be free or open source.
Any recommendations? Thank you.
A bit of an unusual suggestion, but i’ve replaced Excel with Python. I deal with large datasets anyway, so Python was arguably a better fit for what i do.
Packages to check out to see what is possible…
- Streamlit = easy UIs, dashboards, and tables.
- Pandas = dataframe handling, excel, csv ingestion
- Numpy/Scipy = math
- Sqlalchemy/pyodbc = DB connectivity
- xlsxwriter = writing out to exls
- DuckDB = in-memory joins/transformations locally between dataframes using SQL. Basically all the power of a relational DB without a DB server.
- Plotly = graphing
Everything is in text files. Scripts are version controlled in git. Calcs happen super fast. I spend more time transferring data from DBs than waiting for the calcs to finish.
Also, Jupyter Lab is one of the coolest environments for scientific programming. Write documentation and explanations of your work in Markdown while writing the code, and seeing the results. Oh, and it’s programming language agnostic, Python is just the default. I use it with R most of the time.
My bro!
LibreOffice. FOSS alternative.
This is the obvious choice but I heard from accountants it can’t replace excel yet entirely.
Those accountants are using excel like an infrastructure and they are not to be trusted. The only thing excel can do that libreoffice can’t do is create a nightmare web of interdependent spreadsheets.
Isn’t that more a case of them not knowing how it works or how to make new formulas etc, because they were all written by a guy called Tony who left the company in 2002, and everyone’s been just using his templates and copy-and-pasting since?
Give it a try. Only you can judge for your use cases
I use it for all things home office already but my personal uses cases are rather basic so it handles like a chad
