Excel bloat has gotten so bad I learned Python because I was sick of trying to come up with workarounds to make Excel handle moderately sized datasets without crashing. Now I just write python scripts to do anything I need and if I need to show my work to someone who doesn’t use Python I just export my data to Excel and copy over the last few steps in Excel to show how it works. It’s still faster than doing everything in Excel.
Ok but you could also try LibreOffice, its probably much faster than microsofts office.
https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/libreoffice/
At least on my Linux machine, it starts quick and does what I need.
Yeah sure let me get my Fortune 500 employer to switch over to libreoffice that’s a solution.
But seriously though libreoffice is okay if you’re doing very basic stuff, but it’s even jankier than Excel in the circumstances I described minus the background usage just from opening the app.