Agents still can't automate Excel

There are way worse choices to fall back on than LibreOffice. Heck, it's the primary tool I actually use in my business. I can tell you first hand that it does not handle all the random stuff that corporate Excel users come up with, but if you start with basic principles the files usually work great in the other direction.

I once tried using Gemini directly in Google Sheets to make a graph. I never managed to get it to do exactly what I wanted; after wasting way too much time on it I was able to fix the problem in a matter of seconds. It's fascinating because it is quite different from the situation in coding agents where they are in general really quick to read code and find issues/fixes.

I didn't know that. Agents can't do today what I used VB for 20 years ago?

The key is to have agents generate code which exports Excel with live formulae (there's a good Python library).