I argue there are plenty of competent Excel alternatives - you need only look at Excel’s embarrasingly long UserVoice page to see the myriad of small little bugs and missing functionality that make it extremely painful to use, but will never be fixed because it breaks backwards-compatibility or just because “reasons”.
Amongst my personal peeves are: inability to do non-integral scrolling; no multi-statement functions or inline-variables; still no sane and consistent CSV support; and still no TryParseDateExact and TryParseCurrency functions - using Excel when you want to use ISO 8601 consistently is painful.
Most popular does not equate best quality. It means just exactly what it states: most popular (within a target audience). All too often, something less popular is better in one way or another but does not gain traction. For example, because if network effect or because of monopoly abuse.
FWIW, I can do everything I need with LibreOffice. It even runs stable on my Mac. However, on Citrix, my employer does not have LibreOffice, so I gotta resort to MS Office. I gotta work with the tool which is tge default, my choice of preference be damned. Which is rather standard. And students learn to use MS Office because if massive discounts. Bail 'em in when young, and you get lifetime customer. How I ended up staying with my bank post student years.
Amongst my personal peeves are: inability to do non-integral scrolling; no multi-statement functions or inline-variables; still no sane and consistent CSV support; and still no TryParseDateExact and TryParseCurrency functions - using Excel when you want to use ISO 8601 consistently is painful.
https://excel.uservoice.com/