I hate windows. But I have to use it for work. The worse it gets, the more I want to break free completely, minimise my exposure to this OS. The only part I truly cannot do without I think is Microsoft Excel.

Replacing with Excel 2016 or only using webversion or so is insufficient for sure, for work it needs the SharePoint/auto save etc etc stuff. Also power query getting data from SharePoint online.

Replacing with Libreoffice or so seems completely impossible, there’s too many ‘special’ files in organisation, with .xlsm macro mess, I don’t control all that, I can’t fully steer away from such mess but need full functional access.

Other than Excel, I think I could do all my work from a Linux desktop.

Is it possible by now, reliably working in an up to date excel from a base system Linux? What is the way? Have people done this? How? Do I need to run a virtual machine with win11? How do I do that? Does anyone here have experience with it? I have high degree of control over work devices and boss couldn’t care less, as long as I can get my work done.

Thanks and sorry if this is the wrong community for this question (where would it belong better?)

  • SteveTech@aussie.zone
    5·
    21 hours ago

    I avoid O365 as much as possible, but when I need to, I do occasionally use it with Crossover and it seems to work. Activation was a little bit janky, but did work.

    Crossover is a paid version of WINE, and the other apps I’ve seen mentioned run Windows in a VM and forward the apps through RDP. There are advantages to both approaches, but I prefer the efficiency of Crossover.

    • Jess@lemmy.world
      1·
      9 hours ago

      It’s been a year (maybe two) since I last tried. I tried activating mine with my work account and got caught up on the Duo 2FA not working. When you activated yours, did you have to go through any 2FA prompts? If you did, do you remember what tricks (if any) you had to use to make it activate successfully?

      • SteveTech@aussie.zone
        1·
        45 minutes ago

        Yeah it used to be broken for me too, I think only recently did it actually let me activate it. My university also uses Duo 2FA, and I activated it fine. But sometimes it doesn’t activate on the first try, you have to reopen office a few times.

        Also it seems to only let you activate it, you can’t actually sign in with your account for online features yet.