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?)


Had to look into this recently for similar reasons. My conclusion was that once you have macros involved, you can’t use anything but an actual copy of Excel. I’ll be spinning up a qemu VM with Windows to support Excel and the full version of Visual Studio when I get that far.