Excel is the best spreadsheet software in my experience when you have to move beyond the basics. I’ve even tried hard to use the open/Libre alternatives.

Hacker News is a different world than the target customer base for these products. If your use case for spreadsheet software is putting things into tables with some formatting and some light formulas then all of the products will do the same job.

For professionals who use these tools, suggesting they use LibreOffice or something is the equivalent of someone coming to you and suggesting you give up your customized Emacs or Visual Studio Code setup in favor of Notepad++ because they both edit text and highlight code.

> Excel is the best spreadsheet software in my experience when you have to move beyond the basics. I’ve even tried hard to use the open/Libre alternatives.

I agree 100% with this, since I've been trying the same. Although I do think some power-users take it way too far and should be using more robust data analysis tools (Python, DBs) instead of having these monstrous Excel spreadsheets with millions of rows and columns.

> Excel is the best spreadsheet software in my experience when you have to move beyond the basics. I’ve even tried hard to use the open/Libre alternatives.

I strongly agree, but even for the basics! I use LibreOffice for personal use and put up with it only because it’s not Microsoft. It’s laggy, copy paste sometimes doesn’t work, the user interface is quite dated, the fonts are ugly…the list goes on. I donate to Document Foundation so that it can get better, but it moves very slowly.

> Excel is the best spreadsheet software in my experience when you have to move beyond the basics.

This might be true. But most Excel users just use the basics and would be well served to switching to a Free Software alternative such as LibreOffice Calc. Which, is also capable to be used in advanced contexts; although for those cases it is different than Excel, admittedly.

I think most of the excuses saying why people don't switch to Excel alternatives are simply coverups for inertia. I understand that; getting out of the comfort zone is difficult. But it's not impossible.

It's interesting how views differ; I have never been able to make decent scientific graphs in Excel while Calc worked fine for me.

I strongly disagree. If you double-click on a CSV, excel usually opens it in your local code page instead of UTF-8, but they got rid of/hid very well the old text import function so now it fires up PowerQuery when you import a CSV instead. PowerQuery is OK but it doesn't like irregular data. It also saves the query connection automatically. If you massage the data in PQ before you import, it's unlikely that someone who comes after you will know what to do with the query you made. They don't make it easy to can the query to use in the future with similar files. Actually, they make it pretty difficult.

LibreOffice Calc just gives you an import window with some pretty good defaults, like UTF-8. It could be better, but at least it is not worse.

Excel added useful array functions. Good luck finding anyone who can handle that.

Tables in Excel are not really first class citizens. They move differently than everything around them but they don't have an obvious interface for working with them from other parts of the spreadsheet. Within a table you can refer to rows by name, but not outside, really. If you click on a pivot table for a reference, it gives you a GETPIVOTDATA function, when you might have actually wanted E3 or whatever.

And don't get me started on "dates", "numbers", "text", etc., excels weakly strict datatypes.