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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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