This really depends on your needs. I'm sure it's not enough for someone who does Excel wizardry for living. But I use it for tracking personal finances and other simple tasks and graphs, and it is completely sufficient.
This in my book easily earns it the "okay office suite" badge. To be honest all office suites in the last 20 years have been good enough for most small scale needs, including OpenOffice back in the early days.
...but everyone uses a different 10%.
Something that's useless to you might be a dealbreaker to someone else.
I would guess reliance on excel is declining
In some places, yes, especially where certain online options are good enough.
Definitely not in financial services, and many offices I could mention. Even for me: Excel is the reason I haven't completely binned MS Office. For the subset of features I use⁰ it is better all round¹ than other things I've tried.
I'll miss it significantly when the last Windows machine that I operate away from DayJob is no more.
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[0] Probably less than that 10%
[1] There are many tasks for which there is something better, but the something is different in each case. Excel is a very good jack-of-all-trades.
It's in the sweet spot of "already installed" and "kinda-sorta database" and "kinda-sorta programming environment" where industrious people can build massive tooling over the years on top of an Excel sheet.
Yes, it could be an Actual Application, but then Legal gets involved (where is the data stored, what's the contract with the supplier), then you need to talk to Finance (Who's paying for this? Justify the cost!), IT (Managing the installations and licenses) and Security (Is the provider following good practices, is the application audited).
...then you decide "fuck that" and just use Excel, it's good enough.
Anecdote:
A programmer friend got promoted a few steps upward quickly and got into the "provide us with reports" level of employment. Their predecessor (a career manager) had spent multiple days each month manually doing the reports.
But a programmer's mind isn't built like that so they used the fact that Excel can pull stuff from HTTP APIs and now the report takes about 15 minutes to build automatically.
Frankly, calc is just as full featured as excel is, it's just different. About the only issue calc has is correctly parsing excel docs is notoriously difficult.
This is a familiarity problem, not a calc problem.
CSV import in Excel sucks. LibreOffice Calc is far better there.
Best feature of all in LibreOffice Calc: highlight current row/column, so you have a cross-like cursor.
Easier and better embedding of Python and other languages, not the "Python in the Cloud" crap that Excel does.
Less crappy conversions like "oh, that surely looks like a date, let's mess up your data"...
I'm going through a project at the moment where all the data is held in spreadsheets, and every time anyone opens them Excel fucks the numbers to be "scientific notation" despite there being space to display the full number and no way to disable this anti-feature. The amount of times I've had to restore the spreadsheet from a backed up CSV because of data loss is frustrating. I wish I could stop using Excel.
It sounds like the problem in this case is that you don't know how to use basic Excel features.
It isn't rounding or truncating while you are actively using the workbook or saving in its native formats, but it does when saving back out to CSV or certain other formats.
As much as I like Excel for many things, it is sometimes the bane of my existence wrt people using it to manipulate tabular data that isn't in its native formats and causing accidental corruption.
One of the many projects on my list of “things I'll never get around to” is a good⃰ CSV (or other text-based tabular data) editor.
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[*] There are actually quite a few that look good, but don't have some of the features behaviours I want, or in some cases are not available on an appropriate platform (there are a couple of Mac only options for instance), or are paid proprietary apps that are surprisingly expensive (I could justify it and get work to pay in DayJob, but not for my own use).
You just are mixing up two different problems I've listed into one problem and then made the arrogant assumption that I don't know how to use Excel.
Excel has definitely truncated numbers.
In 2020, scientists decided just to rework the alphanumeric symbols they used to represent genes rather than try to deal with an Excel feature that was interpreting their names as dates and (un)helpfully reformatting them automatically. Yesterday, a member of the Excel team posted that the company is rolling out an update on Windows and macOS to fix that.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/21/23926585/microsoft-excel...
Also it drops leading zeros which is annoying when a column is zip codes and it should be imported as string and not number
I agree excel gives ways around these and maybe that's considered basic knowledge but it definitely has poor data-mangling defaults
> writer, perhaps. calc, not even close
For what I see 99% of people do in excel (make a table, then sort it and draw some charts), calc would support all their uses just fine.
For those using it for actual accounting/financial stuff with equations in the cells, and custom macros, etc ... then no, calc won't be sufficient.
The real issue is familiarity and importing, but if you start fresh, LibreCalc is better for me.
Not sure what you mean by this exactly, but I work in banking with a lot of "financial professionals", and the general opinion is that Excel is not good because it screws with numbers, whether its scientific notation (Why? Its just as long as the original number), rounding of numbers (had that with a large list of account numbers just last week where half the account numbers lost the last 3 digits) and there is no easy way of saying "just treat these as entered".
Even setting fields to text doesn't stop Excel from fucking around and overriding them to be date formatted if it feels like the balance could be.
The main issue is that Excel comes with Office and you aren't allowed to install other software so it forces you to use it and get used to it. It really wouldn't take much to be better than Excel.
Both xlsx can be exported and imported. It is just harder
It's not the case that calc is lacking any features which excel has in a finance situation.
mac - if you need battery
excel runs the world, and I mean that unironically.
writer, perhaps. calc, not even close - google sheets is unfortunately better in almost every way, and google sheets aren't great either.