If you use spreadsheets a lot I think Excel pays for itself. Google Sheets offers the most common alternative, free. Macs/iPads come with Numbers, no additional charge.
I get wanting to use free software but sometimes you get what you pay for. Since pretty much everyone who uses spreadsheets uses Excel you just waste your time and energy trying to swim upstream.
> Since pretty much everyone who uses spreadsheets uses Excel you just waste your time and energy trying to swim upstream.
The biggest draw of Excel is that everyone else uses it, imo. This is countered by the fact that you can read and save excel docs using Libre Office Calc.
I have a list of bugbears with Excel that Libre Office handles just fine. The biggest one is its insistence on converting a number range like "2-9" to a date like "09 Feb" when working with CSV data. I've spent hours looking for ways to prevent this - e.g. by formatting cells as Text before saving - but to no avail. Excel thinks it knows better. Libre Office also has a better UI for working with non-standard data formats like tab-separated data.
If you use Excel's import wizard it lets you choose how to format the imported columns. Older versions of Excel supported this. The most recent version, the Office365 desktop app (but I don't think the web app) has a checkbox to turn off automatic data type detection.
You can also export CSV data as ="2-9" to force Excel to interpret it literally. I do that with US ZIP Codes to prevent the conversion to integer, i.e. 02134 turning into 2134.
That actually works! I didn't realise using the import wizard would be different to just double-clicking the CSV file.
I'll still argue that Libre Office Calc's workflow is better at this, in that it presents you with a wizard when you double-click the file and by default does not transform something to a date. But I now have an instruction to give to others who come up against this problem, so thank you.
I get wanting to use free software but sometimes you get what you pay for. Since pretty much everyone who uses spreadsheets uses Excel you just waste your time and energy trying to swim upstream.