[imglorp]

If don't need 100 pct of Excel's bazillion features, Libre Office is a decent alternative. It works with Excel files, doesn't need Windows (but it can run there), and doesn't nag you to join any clouds. And it's free. There's very few home users who actually need full Office.

[vetinari]

My non-favorite pain point with LibreOffice are Excel tables (https://support.office.com/en-us/article/overview-of-excel-t...). Home users won't be missing them, but Excel power users will.

[samstave]

Excel is a requirement for the integration I want to do to another program: bartender

To print barcodes and labels in serial with an ODBC connection... so libre won’t work

[imglorp]

Libre does support ODBC, perhaps not exactly the same way though.

[samstave]

Its on the reverse.... bartender (from seagul scientific, which their software is fantastic by the way) doesn’t support it...

I have a bug filed with them where if you build a thing in google sheets and export to xlsx and attempt to connect to that data source it crashes.... (but if it is native xlsx it works fine) hence my need to install excel on that particular machine, as the bartender software can take tabular input for varying data for each sticker printed ( cannabis compliance labels, which I have now mastered)

They are a great company though, and bartender is an amazing program. I suggest everyone download their free version and learn it.