Excel Replacement?

[blufrog]

Hi,

I'm one of the Office 2019 people that is getting screwed by Micr🤬s🤬ft over their refusal to renew a digital certificate in Office 2019. 🤬🤬🤬

I use Excel a lot for math and engineering, and use the graphing functionality quite significantly.

Is there a good/better replacement for Excel on Mac? I haven't really used or looked at Numbers. Can it compete with Excel?

Hell...I'm even considering putting Lotus SmartSuite in a VM (I used it in the 1990s and I'm still nostalgic about it). I'm really not too fussed, but would prefer a Mac-native alternative.

Like millions before me, I'm slowly moving away from Microsoft/PC (but not for the usual reasons). I'm about two uses away from being able to ditch my PC entirely, but now Micro$oft have screwed things with breaking Office!!!

I WILL NEVER USE SUBSCRIPTION SOFTWARE!

 

[bogdanw]

Have you tried LibreOffice? https://www.libreoffice.org/download/

 

[Mousse]

I use Excel a lot for math and engineering, and use the graphing functionality quite significantly.

If your graphing is limited to 2 axle, LibreOffice Calc can handle the job. If you need XYZ graphing, it can't do that.

Is there a good/better replacement for Excel on Mac?

No spreadsheet is better than Excel on Windows. That's the power of the Dark Side.

 

[blufrog]

Have you tried LibreOffice? https://www.libreoffice.org/download/

I have used OpenOffice, but not for years. I see LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice - is it much better than OpenOffice?

 

[bzgnyc2]

Hi,

I'm one of the Office 2019 people that is getting screwed by Micr🤬s🤬ft over their refusal to renew a digital certificate in Office 2019. 🤬🤬🤬

I use Excel a lot for math and engineering, and use the graphing functionality quite significantly.

Is there a good/better replacement for Excel on Mac? I haven't really used or looked at Numbers. Can it compete with Excel?

Not generally but depending on your situation it may be good enough.

Also try OnlyOffice. They have the best compatibility with Word documents that I've seen. Their spreadsheet component lagged Excel's functionality in the past but I believe they are catching up.

Euro-Office (an upcoming fork of OnlyOffice) might be a good one to follow.

SoftMaker Office might be good as a commercial solution (that has a one-time license option) but I haven't tried it.

Depending on your actual needs you should also consider non-spreadsheet solutions like BI tools (unfortunately, Tableau Desktop, one of the top BI solutions, now subscription), GNU Octave, and other dedicated data analysis and visualization tools.

 

[FreakinEurekan]

Numbers is good at what Numbers does... it's not Excel but it's not bad. It's gained mail merge and Pivot Table ability in the past couple of years, and to be honest the only thing I really miss from Excel is some text formatting options (e.g. being able to adjust the angle of text, helpful if you're dealing with a lot of small columns).

 

[chown33]

In your position, I'd do my own evaluation of any suggested replacement.

I'd pick a few existing spreadsheets that are typical representatives . I'd also pick a few others that contain complex things, or unique things that can only be done with a particular feature. I'd then import those spreadsheets into each app and print the results to PDF without making any changes or edits, to evaluate the default fidelity to original. The PDFs will make it easier to compare the outputs. I'd also make sure I had the output PDFs produced by Excel, because those are the references.

That's just the evaluation for fidelity and correctness. You'd have to separately evaluate how well the UI works for you.