HACKER Q&A
📣 tomrod

Thoughts – will Microsoft ever publish Excel for Linux?


For almost all my use cases, the online version of Office is wonderful. Yes, there is advanced functionality in Word, in Powerpoint, etc. that aren't 100% compatible, but wow, what a fantastic accomplishment by the Microsoft team in making it available by browser.

It would be incredible if MS could publish Excel on Linux. What are the technical limitations preventing this?

  👤 simonblack Accepted Answer ✓
Why would they bother? It would cost MSFT millions to do so, and Linux users wouldn't bother to use it.

I seem to remember about 30 years back MSFT produced something (Word? Excel? IE?) for Linux (or UNIX?). It died within six months or so.

👤 thrower123
Decades of legacy code no one understands fully, and an appreciable fraction of the world economy running on Lovecraftian horrors of spreadsheets dependent on implementation details and bugs in Excel.
👤 natalyarostova
I suspect the future is just a good browser excel, rather than a Linux custom excel.
👤 smackeyacky
File handling, data imports and linking, complete rewrite of the gui. I would guess nobody thinks its a good idea.

Just porting all of the ODBC and COM/DCOM stuff would be a nightmare that even Microsoft is backing away from with the rise of Office365.

I think they would rather all those legacy input formats and data link tech died with windows but if they did decide to port it, you would end up with half of windows itself ported across to make it work and nobody is going to pay for that.

Office365 neatly bypasses all of it by not supporting all that old desktop style workflow and pushing OneDrive as your storage. My guess is even windows users will end up with web versions of office, since they already seem to treat the desktop stuff as a legacy setup.

👤 ohiovr
Not being a power user of libreoffice calc I can't say what excel does that libreoffice can't. Office is kind of like the crown jewels of Microsoft. Well that is before azure came along I guess.
👤 mikewarot
I'm surprised they haven't already done so. Doesn't Office 365 work on Linux?
👤 gigel82
Excel online is also pretty good. Not full featured Excel, but works well enough.
👤 theonemind
The Mac version probably wouldn't be a hard port, except for the GUI parts.