Have you tried the google docs sheet? A lot of Excel lovers seem to like it.

Many of the files are XLSB, which is like XLSX except it stores sheets in a binary format. For reasonably large files, opening XLSB is much faster than XLSX.

Google Sheets straight up fails if you try to upload files in that format. No preview available and no option to work around. So I would have to open the file in Excel anyway.

Relatively new versions of LibreOffice are capable of opening simple files, but once you get into features like named ranges LO fails.

So even if the UI is acceptable, failures on data import force me to keep a copy of Excel around. Keep a VM with Excel for Windows around just in case files don't work in Excel for Mac, but I've used it maybe once in the last 6 months.

Yep. It's almost there. Used to use excel a lot earlier (on Windows) in data science job. Now have excel on Mac, but google spreadsheets mostly gets the job done on most occasions. (Now I am mostly a programmer/product guy) A few problems I have encountered with google spreadsheet: 1. Sharing some stuff with third parties who exclusively use Windows and just want an excel. 2. Speed of working with all the keyboard shortcuts still seems better in desktop excel as compared to google spreadsheet (but I am happy with the progress of how many of those same shortcuts now work on google spreadsheets).

Can you give some examples? (Or even better, some example files to test.)

Some people that use Office really push it hard, they've got macros, indexes, all sorts of junk that's edge-case. The converters do not always pick up on this stuff, or if they do they subtly mangle the formatting enough it's all wrong.

For example, if you have an index then a tiny kerning shift can bump an item to a new page and screw up your numbering.

It really depends on the types of documents you're dealing with. Some are hell, others are a no-brainer.

We would love to have your bug reports: http://bugs.documentfoundation.org/

It's good to search for duplicates first or see this filterable list of the most popular dupes: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/duplicates.cgi

I remember working in an office environment with some very large powerpoint files (50-100 slides with large images), and the rule of thumb was that 'openoffice is free, but MS can handle the big stuff'. Don't know if that's still true, haven't tried OO in a while.

OpenOffice is basically dead in terms of development nowadays. If you're looking for a desktop office suite on Linux, LibreOffice (a fork of OpenOffice) is still actively maintained.

I tried Libreoffice writer briefly recently. I imported some large pictures onto a single page and it became unusably slow. It seemed to be redoing an expensive computation (likely the pictures) with every character I typed. So yes, clearly not as optimised as Word. I had to reluctantly ask to borrow my wife's computer with MS Office for this particular task.

Pretty easy to get Excel + Word + PPT windows versions running under WINE. I have had the 2010 editions working no problems on Ubuntu & Arch.

Do you have a guide? I'd be interested in trying this out as the last time I did anything I needed 2 versions of wine (32/64bit) but I'm hoping office is compiled to 64bit now.

I dont want to be snarky but its literally just using a gui wrapper for WINE called "Play on Linux", google it and just click through a bunch of dialogues its very very easy (and stable!).

Have you tried ONLYOFFICE [1]? I heard that their Office compatibility is better than LibreOffice.

[1] http://www.onlyoffice.com/de/download-desktop.aspx

I find gnumeric to be superior to excel for my workflow: create csv, import it, do math, make N similar graphs, tweak for publication, export to high quality PDF, embed in latex.

You could try office's web app thing if you are mostly a read only excel user.

Surely, you could run it with Wine?