I was wondering what alternatives people and using these days, ideally it will be free I don't want to pay £60 a year for Excel!
Thanks in advance!
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core
there's a self hosted option that i tested in docker and it was fairly simple to get set up, but im mainly using the free version at the moment that is hosted by gristlabs themselves.
the thing i love about it is being able to use python to write formulas, and also being able to have multiple views on one page such as a table view and then a card view that shows information from whatever item is selected in the table view.
ive been using it for about a year now and i couldn't see myself ever going back to regular spreadsheets
Have you checked to see if this bug has been reported -- and if not have you reported it to the Libreoffice developers?
They can't fix what they don't know is happening (if the bug is unreported).
I found even for small personal data spreadsheets are to limiting compared with SQL, so I do not use them any longer.
Btw, I never had stability problems with LibreOffice Calc.
Take a look at this list for some free options : https://alternativeto.net/category/productivity/spreadsheet/...
Maybe some things are better now? But it's not as "crisp" and fast and clean as back then.
Maybe it's just on my machine? All of the above is with a blank sheet or a tiny table.
Maybe that can be a term for software that don't trap you into paying yearly, "Can I get the (I'm) Not-an-aaS-version?".
Do you have spreadsheets that are way too big and don't belong in any spreadsheet app at all?
Is it Windows's fault somehow?
Otherwise run LibreOffice on Linux?
idk, i don't do much with spreadsheets - calculating sums over columns mostly - this feature works like a charm and w/o crashes... but i use it on a linux-desktop system.
and as always: next year is the year of the linux-desktop ;))