I would recommend trying Linux. However depending on the complexity of the excel files you are working on, libreoffice will struggle to be a good replacement. You might be able to get away with a windows VM in your Linux machine to run excel in or the web version of excel.

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I've heard that opening .xls files in LibreOffice can sometimes result in truncated data, depending on how the spreadsheet was created. .csv files, however, seem to work fine.

I've done some research, and everyone seems to recommend using a virtual machine (VM) in this situation. Since we only need these files in the initial stage for importing into a Jupyter Notebook and performing exploratory data analysis (EDA), I think a VM is a reasonable solution and maybe never need to do that.

Thanks, mate 🤙

I used WinApps when I tried to solve this problem: https://github.com/Fmstrat/winapps

Unfortunately for me my machine couldn’t quite perform well enough running the apps in a virtual machine, so it wasn’t useable for me.