Additionally both Google Docs and Libre fall down if you are doing more comprehensive data analysis.
Google Docs is functionally pretty close to most of excel, but has significantly more restrictions in terms of row count.
Libre office misses key functionality available in the latest office releases last time I checked. Things like unique(), filter(), let() and more recently lamda() really do change the game.
Out of curiosty, what kinds of things would actually hit the row limit? It's hard for me to imagine a situation where you have enough data points to reach it, but don't have any specialised software to analyze it.
I work in logistics consulting - it’s pretty common to receive orderline data that is a few hundred thousand rows and excel is great at analysing it (eg to build a material flow).
Excel for this is significantly faster and more flexible than any other tool I’ve used.
Also transport data and models can often use many columns. Google Docs limit is actually the active cells used so this then reduces the row limit further.
If we receive data that is a few million rows on bigger formats, we will still use excel, just with PowerQuery / PowerPivot and using measures which works pretty well up to 10 million records or so.
Don't know about the comment author, but in consulting huge excels are quite the normal. Especially when dealing with data driven domains such as energy
Google Docs is functionally pretty close to most of excel, but has significantly more restrictions in terms of row count.
Libre office misses key functionality available in the latest office releases last time I checked. Things like unique(), filter(), let() and more recently lamda() really do change the game.