What can be a good alternative for Excel that works on Linux? Currently I need to use VBA, Solver, Analysis Toolpak charts. Moreover the alternative should read xls and xlsx files. Doesn’t need to be free or open source.

Any recommendations? Thank you.

  • TurturtleyEnglish
    15·
    20 hours ago

    A bit of an unusual suggestion, but i’ve replaced Excel with Python. I deal with large datasets anyway, so Python was arguably a better fit for what i do.

    Packages to check out to see what is possible…

    • Streamlit = easy UIs, dashboards, and tables.
    • Pandas = dataframe handling, excel, csv ingestion
    • Numpy/Scipy = math
    • Sqlalchemy/pyodbc = DB connectivity
    • xlsxwriter = writing out to exls
    • DuckDB = in-memory joins/transformations locally between dataframes using SQL. Basically all the power of a relational DB without a DB server.
    • Plotly = graphing

    Everything is in text files. Scripts are version controlled in git. Calcs happen super fast. I spend more time transferring data from DBs than waiting for the calcs to finish.

    • umbraroze@lemmy.world
      2·
      12 hours ago

      Also, Jupyter Lab is one of the coolest environments for scientific programming. Write documentation and explanations of your work in Markdown while writing the code, and seeing the results. Oh, and it’s programming language agnostic, Python is just the default. I use it with R most of the time.