Microsoft Excel

xraylady

What are my options if I want to get MS Excel? Is it included in any MS package ? Office . Where best to buy ?

tritriagain

xraylady wrote: »

What are my options if I want to get MS Excel? Is it included in any MS package ? Office . Where best to buy ?

Do you need excel? Libre office is a great free alternative. It will suffice unless you are a power user.

Robert ninja

As above mentioned you probably won't need MS products for personal use. If it's required for work or education they should be providing you the keys/logins.

https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/calc/

xraylady

tritriagain wrote: »

Do you need excel? Libre office is a great free alternative. It will suffice unless you are a power user.

It’s actually for my daughter who would be using it for research. She has a Mac. Is Libre version of Excel user friendly?

Yakuza

Microsoft are nudging users to a "software as a service" model - so you can licence Office for €7 a month or €70 for the year, rather than shell out (what used to be) hundreds of euro as a one-off payout.

See here

Google sheets is another free alternative if you don't need advanced functionality.

I use it with an office subscription of 9.99 a month which gives a load of OneDrive storage also. That said, I find myself using Google Sheets far more often these days.

Robert ninja

As much as any other in my personal experience. Here's a preview

There's also google sheets which can be used via your browser and has inbuilt google drive sync/backup https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets

brav

xraylady wrote: »

It’s actually for my daughter who would be using it for research. She has a Mac. Is Libre version of Excel user friendly?

As mentioned above google sheets are good free alternative.

Also Numbers(Apple version of spreadsheets) should already be included with Macs and can open Excel files and save as Excel files, and is prob the best at making charts look nice

However despite all this, depending on the research she is doing Excel might be required if some specific formulas are needed etc

TheBoyConor

If she is doing a masters just get the Office student package which will have Workd, Excel , outlook, powerpoint.

For a masters it is likely that lecturers and other students will be using microsoft products and you don't want to be screwing around with your coursework on a different software. Trust me. I used OpenOffice for some of my masters and it was like going back 20 years. Awkward, outdated interface and despite it's claims it really is not as compatible with Microsoft formats as they would have you believe.
I found that a spreadsheet done in OO/LO when opened and resaved in Excel would loose all the formula and be left with values only if you weren't meticulous in selecting the xls file format every time . Not good. Similarly often pictures in work documents would be lost and replaced with a big red x when swapping between Word and the OO/LO version.

You don't want her to be faced with this calamity a week before the submission date.

Overall i found the open source packages massively inferior to the Microsoft equivalents. Outdated interface, not user friendly and in general just a pain in the balls to use and get things to work the way you want.

And as for using Google docs for a masters? Go on will you! Google docs is fine for messing about with lists and itty bitty things but it has nowhere near the fuctionality one needs to do a masters. I don't know what type of course your daughter is doing but certainly wouldn't be doing an engineering masters with docs or OO/LO.

smuggler.ie

As above, you want to stick to same software as course is presented with to avoid "overhead" problems.

Side note:
Most, if not all, educational institutions have virtually unlimited free licenses available for tutors/teachers and students. For both, O365 and G-suite
Often those licenses either not used or dispersed to staff members and their families:rolleyes:.
Check with institution management if they would provide one for duration of the course.