>It seems like your argument is that alternatives don't have PowerQuery. That might be true (I don't even know what it is), but isn't that like saying Linux can't compete with Windows, because it doesn't have Internet Explorer? I mean, it doesn't, but there are excellent alternatives that can accomplish exactly the same task.

It's true that Google sheets and LibreOffice don't have Powerquery, and that's a big pain. But the worse thing is that they don't have tables. As in, the "format as table" button in Excel. As in, the bread and butter of anyone who gets serious work done in Excel.

Maybe it's a problem of naming -- "format" makes people think it's just about aesthetics, but actually it imparts real semantic structure onto a rectangular grid of data. It also isn't the same thing as pivot tables, with which they are often confused. It gives the grid a name that you can refer to in formulae, and the columns are named too, with their names living inside the table namespace ("structured references" is what Microsoft calls it). The table automatically expands its boundaries when you start typing a column header to the right of the current columns, and likewise it expands to comprise the row beneath it if you type values into that row. And it has smart indexing: there's special syntax to refer to "this table" and "this row" in formulae.

So you can have say, a table named "ExpensesTable", labelled "Date", "Type of Expense" and "Amount" in columns A:C. Then you can type "Tax" at the top of column D, it will expand the table to include a new blank column for Tax. Then in D2, type

    =[@[Amount]] * 0.2

and it will automatically fill down the Tax column with 20% of the value of the Amount columns. Then in a cell outside the table, do

    =sum(ExpensesTable[Amount])

to get the total amount of expenses. These are both simple examples; you can do more complex and interesting things involving multiple columns, ranges of columns, joins, etc. The point is the semantic structure that makes your spreadsheet more than just a rectangular soup of cells, so you don't have to claw through endless cryptic "G70:$K100" cell references. If we add a new row or column, we don't have to alter any formulae at all; the bounds are automatically resized on the cell arrays that the column names refer to. Think of it like a mutable resizable dataframe. It's the core data structure of an efficient, scalable, maintainable Excel document.

More about structured references: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/using-structured-...

Also the "You Suck At Excel" talk by Joel Spolsky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c

And no, I have no idea why the eggheads at Google don't implement this for Sheets. Maybe Microsoft has a patent on it? Wouldn't surprise me. But this is why you'll have to pry Excel out of spreadsheet jockeys' cold dead hands -- the alternatives don't have this basic thing.