I hate windows. But I have to use it for work. The worse it gets, the more I want to break free completely, minimise my exposure to this OS. The only part I truly cannot do without I think is Microsoft Excel.
Replacing with Excel 2016 or only using webversion or so is insufficient for sure, for work it needs the SharePoint/auto save etc etc stuff. Also power query getting data from SharePoint online.
Replacing with Libreoffice or so seems completely impossible, there's too many 'special' files in organisation, with .xlsm macro mess, I don't control all that, I can't fully steer away from such mess but need full functional access.
Other than Excel, I think I could do all my work from a Linux desktop.
Is it possible by now, reliably working in an up to date excel from a base system Linux? What is the way? Have people done this? How? Do I need to run a virtual machine with win11? How do I do that? Does anyone here have experience with it? I have high degree of control over work devices and boss couldn't care less, as long as I can get my work done.
Thanks and sorry if this is the wrong community for this question (where would it belong better?)
If its for work, its on a work machine.
That said, I have a lot of efforts (personal projects with hardware I get given, or side work not related to my job) where I need specific software. For those, I have a VM tailored to that application that's been trimmed down as much as possible.
This let's me rdp into them, do what I need to do, save to a designated location, and shut the VM down. Since its a VM I tend not to give it network access unless required, and I have USB drive I pass through to the VM.
This makes sure everything works, I limit the access of MS with local only accounts and win 10 (among other specific versions like XP for a specific piece of hardware, server 2008 for an irritating piece of software I sometimes need, etc).
All the VMs are on my proxmox cluster, easy to start/stop with a script.