I can at least assure you that as a developer, docker is annoying to set up and their documentation is confusing.
Most things in Linux are easier to set up but sometimes installing things happens to be harder than it should be and docker is one of them.
You should keep in mind that compared to other OSs, a lot of Linux software is CLI only, so they won’t always show up in the applications list and you’ll need to check if you have it in a terminal.
Why isn’t the company paying for it? Anyways, you could just export it to a different format and then back to Excel depending on which features you’re using. But also, I think this is being paranoid. Microsoft isn’t the NSA