I agree - libreoffice works rather well reading and writing xls - that is my experience too.
Of course there are going to be outliers with complex macros, schemes, exotic in-line attachments. If in doubt, you can subscribe to Microsoft's Office 365. I am not 100% sure they guarantee anything, but you should be more comfortable. I would encourage you to look through bunch of recent libreoffice release notes - you will note what type of stuff they are fixing in respect to import export features. My hat goes down to Colabora folks for their major contributions to upstream libreoffice and other core free software projects. They are simply amazing contributor. Tomas On Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 12:02 <ken...@tuta.com> wrote: > The warning is overkill. Microsoft Excel does the same bellyaching about > .ods files. For the vast majority of uses, there are no real problems. If > you ever get into a xlsx file that has someone's entire job coded into half > a dozen macros and some vbscript, it might be worth using Excel. Otherwise, > LibreOffice can rather masterfully read the xlsx to pull data from it. > > Thanks | おおきに / ありがとう | Kiitos | Merci | Gracias | Obrigada | Grazie | 谢谢 > | Danke | Wado | спасибо, > 賢進ジェンナ「Kenshin, Jenna」 > > "You should be as alive as you can until you're totally dead!" - Dylan > Moran > > > > 2025年7月28日 7:53 差出人: rowl...@access.net: > > > I found a USDA published spreadsheet[1] [in xlsx format] containing > needed data. I saved it to a local directory with no problems. > > > > I copied it to another directory to prevent accidents. > > I opened it - Debian defaulted to LibreOffice Calc. > > I tried to save it [unedited] to file2.xlsx. Got dire warning and > suggestion to save in ODF format. > > > > Does Debian have a spreadsheet program that can competently read/write > xlsx format? > > > > TIA > > > > [1] > https://www.fns.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/file/TFP-2021-Disaggregated-Market-Basket.xlsx > > > >
