Windows

Excel Substitutes?

Posted by on Apr 3, 2007 | 10 Comments

We figured we’d throw this out there in case anyone might have any solutions to the question posed here. In another response to Is OpenOffice Open Enough For You?, Gnomie Rodrigo writes:

I can tell you that it is possible to live without MS Office, depending on what you do for a living or as a hobby. I’ve been living without it for about two years now, and it wasn’t even a conscious decision. I switched to a new computer and simply forgot to install MS Office – and it’s been like this for all this time.

When I need to write something, anything, I’ll just go for metapad (that Notepad substitute, you know) and leave to format it on another place, like the Hotmail window or, in advanced cases, the good old WordPad that comes with Windows. In extreme cases, PageMaker will do it for me, but it sure does A LOT more than the regular MS Word and takes a lot less HD room.

Right now, I’m looking for a simple alternative to Excel, but Excel only, and a really simple one (just text charts with a little math, borders, and other easy stuff). I have two or three spreadsheets that were made in Excel (in another computer) and I occasionally have to edit them and guarantee compatibility at the same time.

Do you have any suggestions? Thanks a lot!

[tags]OpenOffice, Excel, Excel substitute, alternative to Microsoft[/tags]

  • http://www.tinyapps.org/text.html Steve Gutry

    Go to tinyapps.org and look for spread32.
    It will open & save excell files and is only about 1 meg in size.

  • StinkyCheeseMan

    Corel’s QuattroPro can open and save as .xls files. I use it all the time. It comes bundled with WordPerfect Office

  • http://www.revs.org Matt Williams

    I think not having Office is just biting off your nose to spite your face.

  • Tom Khoury

    Gnumeric (at http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/) is a good simple and fast-loading spreadsheet. It does not have all of the features of Excel, but it has all of the ones that most people need, and even several mathematical and statistical functions not found in other packages.

  • http://ExcelSubstitute Dennis Williams

    Chris,

    FYI, my wife has a fairly complex (for home use!) Excel file with fill-in date boxes, etc., on which she keeps attendance and other records on women in her sorority. Since I don’t want to buy a second Excel program, the file would not import correctly into Quattro Pro nor PlanMaker (from the German company).

    But the file imported flawlessly into Open Office’s Calc program. Very impressive.

    My belief is that 90% of people — who don’t do or need the fancy things with text or spreadsheets or graphics — do not need MS Office. Few people recognize this fact.

    For example, the college for which I teach my online English literature class “requires” MS Office. Yet none of the work we do requires fancy formatting.

    So if I were to choosing, I’d still go with Open Office.

    Thanks.

  • http://www.toddalbert.com/ Todd

    While I have found many suitable alternatives to Word — WordPerfect, Pages, and a number of opensource alternatives — I have yet to find a substitute for Excel that matches it in power. And I say this as an individual that is not fond of antything Microsoft. Still, if you are looking for a simple solution, OpenOffice’s spreadsheet or Corel’s may do the trick.

  • http://www.woundedmoon.org/win32/kyplot.html havelock

    You can try http://www.woundedmoon.org/win32/kyplot.html Kyplot which has been developed for several years – very ‘excel-esque’ and has several useful features.

  • http://ashendorf.com Dennis Ashendorf

    I use Google Docs spreadsheets for information that I gather from different places when using different computers. It’s easy to use, but no graphing. BTW skip the word processor. Unbelievably bad.

  • Bruce

    Spread32 2.01
    Spread32 is fully compatible with Microsoft Excel! It is essentially a mini-Excel with all of the basic features that you would expect in a competent spreadsheet program.

    The Shareware version is free and not time-limited, and can be downloaded from the table below.

    It can also be run from a USB drive and leave no files on your C drive.

    http://www.byedesign.freeserve.co.uk/

  • Rodrigo

    Hey, just now I see this. Thanks a lot, everybody, I’ll check some of these solutions, for sure!

    spread32, Gnumeric, Kyplot all sound interesting. They deserve a shot.

    Dennis, “My belief is that 90% of people do not need MS Office. Few people recognize this fact.” – exactly my thoughts when I first sent that message to Chris. And I’m a journalist, which makes it unbelievable to a lot of people who are convinced that journalistic tasks can only be performed using MSWord and/or fancy word processors.