I no longer use spreadsheets and haven’t for a long time. I don’t think there are any spreadsheet instances on any of my computers and if there are, they are relics from the mists of time. Any spreadsheet operations that I need to do are done with Org tables.
Of course, I’m not doing financial forecasting or other complicated calculations which may—I don’t know for sure—be easier with a spread sheet. Still, even for those of us who rely entirely on Org tables, it’s sometimes convenient to import a spreadsheet in the sense of converting it to an org table.
Over at the YouTube Emacs Elements channel there’s a nice video on importing an Excel spreadsheet into an Org table. It’s an elementary operation that just captures the data but not the formulas used to calculate the cells. The TL;DR is that you just highlight the spreadsheet data, copy it to the clipboard, paste it into an Org buffer, and call org-table-create-or-convert-from-region to make it into an Org table.
The video shows how to add a line under the headings, delete some columns, and add a new column with some calculated data from the other columns. It might seem like this is a bit restricted but if you’re importing a spreadsheet, you’re almost certainly just interested in the data and not the formulas used to calculate it. Even so, it’s possible to calculate new data from what you import as the video shows.
My main takeaway from the video is how easy it is to grab the data from a spreadsheet and turn it into an Org table in the obvious way.