I'm a Windows sysadmin during the day that's implementing Office 365 Enterprise, so I know all about Office. If you're a college student, your best bet is to get a free student account to Office 365 and use Office Online. They're like Google Apps in that they run in the browser, but they're Microsoft Office. I don't know if there's anything fancy in Excel that the online version doesn't have, but it's worth checking out.

My solution for when I work from home is running Office 2010 in Wine. It works really well with some minor overrides and tweaking. I got a license through work, you may have issues procuring a legit 2010 license.

EDIT: Apparently I'm too tired to format a link properly today, so here you go: https://products.office.com/en-us/studen...-education