bug So you went from "Basically all students will find it useful (if not essential)" to some students absolutely need Excel. I guess you're starting to see my point of view.

If it's work related, my employer should pay for the licence. Totally unrelated topic.

I agree with you on the IDE argument. Unfortunately my employers always go for free IDEs (productivity be damned), so I don't need to pay for an IDE to improve my skills.

And again your argument hinges on people needing to do advanced stuff in Excel.

Nope. All students will find it useful in a way: Word is great for essays or reports, Excel is great for all math-related stuff and PP is great for presentations. And every once in a while a student has to do a presentation for a seminar or something.Sure, you don't need MS Office for those things, but they're the most polished and easiest to use variants. This becomes even more important if you're not very experienced and you just want a tool to do the job.If you're required to work at home, he should provide the tools. But if you just want to finish something (which is not legal on a home license - BTW) or train, he won't. And honestly, it's very unlikely that you'd be given time during working hours to just practice your Excel skills or something.So maybe you just underestimate the importance of MS Office? I knew switching to something "more serious" will do the job. :-PDefine "advanced".Yes, some people (even doing typical financial jobs at banks and insurers) use Excel just for data input and simple algebraic operations. Even something as basic as vlookup makes them confused.But in time every person will get to know something useful - mostly thanks to how easy to use Excel is.Example? It's quite easy to teach someone using pivots. And it is easy, because of how really well they're implemented in Excel. Other suites (both paid and free) are nowhere near. Current LibreOffice implementation reminds me of Excel 97.But I've just checked Google Sheets and pivots there are easily the worst I've seen, ever. Even the first implementations (by Lotus in early 90s) were better. It's just like if pivot was some experimental feature: hidden deeply in the menu and unneeded. Totally shocking. :oBut it's not even the "advanced" analytical stuff that is easier or more powerful in Excel. As @Frick pointed out: it's also the basic stuff like formatting tables.I've been using Excel for around 20 years and I've experienced the evolution that they invested in to make this the most comfortable spreadsheet available. And you can really see that most of the features are beautifully polished.But occasionally I have to use a free alternative and the simple fact is: they don't change at all. They all look and feel (and perform...) like Excel did when phone display resolution was measured in lines of text.I guess you might be more of a gamer than a number cruncher, so how would you feel if a game released in 2017 look like that from 2000? It's not like old games aren't playable or fun, but it's not what you'd expect, right?