European alternatives to Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel is the desktop spreadsheet most financial and operational models in the world are built in. It calculates locally, so a workbook of hundreds of thousands of rows stays responsive with no network, and it carries a data-engineering layer above the grid: Power Query for repeatable imports and transforms, Power Pivot with the DAX language for modelling across tables, and VBA for macros and bespoke functions. A free web version exists; the desktop application is what the subscription buys.

What makes it hard to leave is not the formulas but what has been built on them. A finance team’s workbooks reference each other, refresh through named Power Query connections, and feed add-ins an auditor expects to see. Pivot layouts, number formats and conditional rules survive an export unevenly, and VBA has no equivalent anywhere else.

Any replacement is therefore tested on .xlsx round-trip fidelity first. The European options below both read and write the format through the LibreOffice engine — one on the desktop, one in a self-hosted browser — and neither has a Power Query or Power Pivot equivalent.