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.

  • Turturtley ( Turturtley@aussie.zone ) English
    12·
    2 years 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.