Which spreadsheet program do you guys use? (even if it's not emacs related)

## Options I tried ### Emacs based options I do use org-mode as spreadsheet a lot for smaller tasks. With it, I am able to quickly make tables, enter data, make small calculations and can export them to other programs using csv. But org mode can not fully replace a spreadsheet program. I tried other emacs modes like ses modebut did not find it satisfactory, for start the cell alignment seemed very off. ### Vim based options I tried few unixy, vimmy spreadsheets like sc-im, sc etc but entering dates, autofilliing and created named cells and ranges was not supported. Also can't use these in windows while at work. Vim table mode provided some table editing supported but lacked a lot. ### Free unix spreadsheets Gnumeric hanged a lot in my manjaro setup. Libre office was good but it had bad shortcut keys and didn't have those that I already used in excel. So I have kinda accepted defeat to use a proprietary program without vim or emacs like keybindings for spreadsheets i.e excel. There doesn't seem to be alternative now.

I do not use them. Not feel the need of them. I have tables, I have programming languages. I do not need anything else...

A possibility on the terminal (via dos emulation): [Lotus 1-2-3 For Linux](https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/linux123.html)

I do use org-mode for small tables and [orgutils](https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/orgutils/) in R. Otherwise, it's Excel if having reactive updating or multiline cells are necessary.

I use gnumeric.

LibreOffice .. has the features you want but not the right keybinds? Sounds like thats the way to go .. maybe you can fix the keybinds or live with them. How bad can they be? Or vm/remote+ excel if you must.

Google Sheets. Most spreadsheets I do are shared with families or clients. I’m lucky when they know how to click on a link. :) Anything numbers related beyond simple spreadsheets is done with a Jupyter notebook and python - is there a good emacs mode for notebooks?

org-mode + org-babel

I use visidata. Highly recommended.

If you want to use Jupiter and share notebooks then ein, if you only want it for yourself then definitely org mode. It's like Jupiter in steroids and lot better.

I use pandas & org-jupyter if it's something beyond a basic task. LibreOffice Calc if it's not or if I have to open someone else's spreadsheet.

Excel. All day. It pains me to say it, but it's actually really good.

Excel. I need onenote so have that installed via crossover / wine, which gives me excel for free should I need it. Saves me from downloading libre-office every time I update.

How does onenote give excel for free? Do you pay for onenote?

Onlyoffice

Sorry poor choice of words. I meant free as in it's already installed (with an office license).

I find spreadsheets to be a truly terrible way of interacting with data. Too much clicking, too much good information obscured (formulas) and too much garbage on the screen. I don’t need to see hundreds of rows of stuff. Usually it’s only necessary to know what’s contained in the columns. As a result I just do stuff in org-babel plus whatever suits my problem (normally Julia these days). Julia has an XLSX package for… XLSX interaction.

For any type of work this is becoming standard

If the spreadsheet is not solely for my own consumption then I use either Google Sheets or Excel365 depending on who I'm collaborating with. LibreOffice is my fallback if the data in the spreadsheet can't be stored in the cloud for regulatory reasons. If it's just for me, then it's done in either Sheets or org-mode. The more complicated the data manipulation I need is, the more likely I am to use org-mode so that I can process the data with python (via org-babel). As someone already mentioned here, this works kind of like a Jupyter Notebook. You're not limited to using python, though. Org-babel supports a number of other languages.

csv-mode does the job for me

Nice, did not know about it. Works fine inside vterm. I'm going to experiment with it.

There it is. In every discussion about clog remover recommendations, someone eventually disdains quick-and-dirty solvents.

Last time I tried visidata, it didn't do well at one important spreadsheet task: Making a column defined by a formula, and storing the formula for that column, so that I could later edit the formula. Has that changed?

For my stuff, just org-mode. At work, MS Excel when forced to leave Emacs.

I'm a CPA so I use Excel. It's not that I need to for work, but that Excel is actually much better than any other spreadsheet I've used, unfortunately enough. I use Windows in a VM on my Linux host mostly just for Excel!

visidata is less a spreadsheet and more of a highly concentrated ball of spreadsheet fury :)

Microsoft Excel (web version). Have been reconsider using excel for privacy reasons and replace it with [fortune-sheet](https://github.com/ruilisi/fortune-sheet) (a project I recently came across).

I nowadays pretty much only use org-mode tables. The main issue there is that you need to have all your formulas in one line, which makes it pretty much unreadable and unmaintainable for very complex tables. With the ability to have multiple lines of formulas, and maybe even have inline comments plus making references to tables in separate files a bit easier it'd be able to handle pretty much any complexity.

Agreed. It's truly a most underrated gem. I am using a variety of tools for tabular data analysis. Excel, Org table, panda... but I use visidata whenever I can. It is an absolutely joy to use.

I must say I don't create a lot of formulas in vd, but I do remember reading from the documentation you can use any Python expression.

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Low-key, Manjaro can be a bit finnicky, especially given their history. I would recommend looking at EndeavorOS if you end up running into other issues.

Org-mode is great if you're not looking at the data directly. Jupiter on steroids is a good description.

I’m pretty much telling him to move house if the drain is clogged

Nice username

Obviously spreadsheets aren't well served by the free software movement, which is odd given that they're probably the most popular kind of end-user programmable software (a category of which Emacs is the shining epitome).

How do you autofill dates in org tables?

I think I never needed that - I do a lot with times, but pretty much never need dates. I assume it can be made to work with org-table-copy-down, on a table with tagged dates. I usually use [calc](https://orgmode.org/manual/Formula-syntax-for-Calc.html#Formula-syntax-for-Calc) in my tables a lot, which can do math on untagged times - but seems the same would need to be implemented first for dates.

I use spreadsheets either for small data sets or for data entry. For the former I find org-table and #+TBLFM sufficient; while for the latter I’m using org-tables _because_ of keyboard macros, but I’m not fully satisfied with its sluggishness when having 100+ rows (and I often end up with 1-2k rows… which is very slow). If I could use kmacro somewhere else that was fast I’d do that!

If you're fine with working on delimited text files in a non-interactive manner [qsv](https://github.com/jqnatividad/qsv) is a good option. Especially with large files. It's a fork of similar xsv. I've used it for querying my files before doing any analysis with r dplyr.

I use R for anything with tables; it outperforms excel ; if you have to deal with excel from others... that is something else 👊🏻👊🏻

I keep hearing this but I don't understand. How can R or any programming language replace excel? Does it have gridlines where you can enter data? Autofill it, use absolute and relative references, apply formulas and functions? what is the visual interface to it? How is it different from pandas?

Our non-answers are just our way of saying we equate the spreadsheet with a store-bought pie crust, which isn't saying they don't have a place in the world.

A spreadsheet is a bunch of programming statements with a data entry UI, cascading, and a UI for making more statements

Don't understand what that means

I do remember that you can write any python expression, and that it stored the results of the python expression in the column, but not the expression itself. In MS excel, libre office calc, etc, in a cell, you write, for example "=b2 + c2" and it shows the result in the cell, but it also shows the formula in a "formula bar" so you can see what you're calculating and edit the formula.

You can set `ses-mode`s cell alignment using a [printer function](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/ses.html#Printer-functions). If you want something more visidata-like and speak R, there's [ess-view-data](https://github.com/ShuguangSun/ess-view-data/) - which seems to lack a way to directly edit a cell, but I think a little elisp could help there.