The user who posted this question is asking the right thing, but for the wrong reasons. An £85 annual subscription for basic document editing is indeed steep when all you need is a stable viewer that preserves your formatting. The real issue here isn't the cost of Microsoft 365. It's that the user, and millions like them, are still thinking about spreadsheets as static files to open, edit, and save.
The practical problem is straightforward. You have .xlsx files from work, from school, from a decade of personal budgeting. You need them to look exactly the same when you open them on a different application. LibreOffice handles that well for most documents, though complex conditional formatting and certain chart types will occasionally break. WPS Office is closer to Microsoft's rendering engine, but it pushes its own subscription model. Google Sheets works fine for simple data entry, but it chokes on large files and offline access is clunky. Every option forces a trade-off you shouldn't have to make.
Here is what we think: stop looking for a cheaper replacement. Start looking for a smarter approach. The user's description of their own workflow, "nothing advanced, just basic spreadsheets", is exactly the profile that the old spreadsheet model fails. You open a file, you type in a few cells, you close it. That process has not meaningfully changed since Lotus 1-2-3. The tool has evolved, but the interaction pattern has stayed the same. You are paying £85 a year to replicate a workflow from 1992.
What changes this is AI-native spreadsheet technology. Imagine a tool that doesn't require you to open a file at all. You ask it a question: "Show me my spending by category for last quarter." It understands your data, retrieves the relevant cells, and presents the answer. You do not navigate columns. You do not write formulas. You do not worry about formatting because the formatting is irrelevant to the question you are actually trying to answer. The file format becomes an implementation detail, not a constraint.
The user should not have to choose between paying £85 and losing formatting reliability. They should be able to tell a spreadsheet what they need, and have it respond. That is the direction the technology is moving, and it is already available. The question is not which legacy tool costs less. The question is whether you want to keep paying for a file viewer, or start using a tool that actually does the work for you.