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Comment by gchamonlive | Hacker News Reader

Excel as a product and a brand is very confusing.

On the one hand you have all these great features, but on the other I can't even import a simple spreadsheet with checkboxes to excel online without breaking it because of active objects not being supported online.

It rides on the massive weight Microsoft market share has, so it doesn't have to be portable, open and consistent.

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100% agree. Is there any good alternative with the same kind of functionality? I don't know of anything.

I really have no idea. I sometimes receive excel forms from clients and contractors that even though they are nothing fancy they won't open on excel online. I am a full time DevOps and systems architect can't work without Linux you see.

So sometimes I have to resort to a Windows VM and Excel, the real deal to fill out those forms.

I used wine a long time ago, but it would only support a very specific, very ancient version of Excel, so a VM is actually less of a hassle (when already prepared. The process of installing windows on a VM was quite frustrating for me).

But no, I don't think there is any substitute to excel. Microsoft made sure of that.

Can you please describe your use case?

I know for me, I have a personal budgeting spreadsheet that is fairly complex. I'd love to simplify aspects of it with macros and checkboxes. However I can't use any macro-related features because then it becomes incompatible with the web interface, and I sometimes like to use that when working on Linux.

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