Excel was always an antipattern for me, I work with biological data, which Excel until recently couldn't even import without data corruption [1]

If it's necessary to recreate all the keyboard shortcuts for Excel like Emacs has done with evil-mode for vim, maybe that works, I don't know.

Hell the finance guys can almost make their own replacement on their own today, with AI.

[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/one-five-genetics-pa...

This. Judging from replies there are a lot of folks here who imagine Excel usage being something on the order of basic readouts with some SUM()'s and MEAN()'s.

The real grip comes from entire business processes implemented across dozens of worksheets with incredibly complicated cross linked formulae relying on Excel edge case behavior. As soon as LibreOffice et al display the most minute differences they're done and will never be mentioned again.

What about libreoffice calc?

Peyton-Jones says excel is demonstrably FP so UI aside (which is SAMOP) Haskell seems sensible especially for the finance team.

The serious answer here is that a lot of MS products have kindof dual purpose: they are 90% used for very simple stuff (collecting data into a spreadsheet, having a text editor that allows basic styling), and 10% stuff that power users rely on (huge excel files with complicated formulas for data transformation and visualization, word / ppt templates with byzantine branding). The answer is that for the simple stuff you rely on open / cheap alternatives, and for the complex stuff (eg visualizing and transforming data for non-programmers, generating presentations and branded text documents) you can just ask ai now.

Row Zero (now part of Databricks) is by far the best spreadsheet on the market - it's not even close.

Row Zero's fully Excel compatible, including keyboard shortcuts, long-tail pivot table configurability, 500+ built-in formulas like LAMBDA and LET, and real-time collab. But it scales 1000x beyond Excel (2 billion row limit vs 1 million for Excel), has built in connectors to everything (Databricks, Postgres, S3, Snowflake, etc), native Python support, deep AI integration with Databricks Genie, and all the security and data governance features to make big banks and healthcare providers comfortable. It's built by the team who brought Rust into AWS and rewrote S3's file system circa 2018.

We're used by individuals and small businesses all the way up to huge deployments in the Fortune 100.

Source: Was founder and CEO, now leading spreadsheet development at Databricks

R and Python are both obvious replacements for data processing, and having the data itself appear in read-write columns of an Excel file is and has always been ludicrous.

Excel was for a time when programming meant more arcane languages. In 2026, there is no excuse for a business major not to know Python or R. They're both easy.

I'm not an Excel expert so I can't judge but https://getartcraft.com/apps/gridcraft is in heavy development at the moment