Excel Substitute?

[ldburroughs]

Is anyone familiar with a Mac based software program that can open Excel spreadsheets? I'm looking for something other than Excel because I'm trying to free myself from the clutches of Microsoft. I am actually happy with Pages as a decent word processor/publisher software substitute for Word but have not found anything for Excel. Does anything exist?

 

[clayj]

There is no substitute for Excel. 🙂

 

[ldburroughs]

There is no substitute for Excel. 🙂

This is the unfortunate truth. I don't work very much in Excel but I occassionally receive an Excel document and I don't want to buy Office just for that reason. I have the entire Office package for my Windows desktop so I guess I will keep using that for my Excel needs.

 

[rasp]

Agreed, there is no substitute. However, if you just need to look at the occasional .xls file you might want to look into OpenOffice.org or NeoOffice/J. While not fantastic at converting, they might be Good Enough.

 

[ldburroughs]

Agreed, there is no substitute. However, if you just need to look at the occasional .xls file you might want to look into OpenOffice.org or NeoOffice/J. While not fantastic at converting, they might be Good Enough.

Thanks for this info. I'll take a look at both. I really don't do very much in Excel and just want to view something from time to time. I just didn't want to purchase Office for the Mac when I have Office 2003 on my PC.

Update: I am currently using both versions to see which one I intend to keep. They both do the trick and will compliment Pages very well for those occassionally used files. No more need for Office on this Mac. I'll leave that to my desktop PC. Thanks for the suggestion and help.

 

[mkrishnan]

Also, if you have one of the Macs that comes with it, AppleWorks will open relatively simple Excel files, too. I use Office/Mac, FWIW, though.

 

[Nuc]

check this out

This is a more powerful program. Check it out... It's more expensive than excel, but it's not MS. Deltagraph

Good Luck!

Nuc

 

[mkrishnan]

This is a more powerful program. Check it out... It's more expensive than excel, but it's not MS.

Nuc, I haven't used Deltagraph in a loooooooong time, but from my memory, there are some really substantial differences in the way they handle information, so that while Deltagraph is a *great* program for many kinds of analysis, it is not really good at the task of periodically opening up other people's Excel files and plaaying with them.

Specifically, from what I remember, DG's "spreadsheet" is a structured data entry system, meaning you define variables and load them into the columns, in a similar way to SPSS or SAS, and in contrast to Excel, where the spreadsheet is freeform, and you can enter anything you want (formulas or values) into any cell, and operations can address cells with arbitrary relationships by using the cell number. I didn't think that's the sort of thing DG did. So if you load an Excel file into DG, it can be totally different because data would have to be force-fit into DG variables. Has this changed?

OTOH, DG makes wonderful graphs, and has some very good analytic properties that combine point-and-click goodness with the beginnings of real statistical analysis. 😎

 

[Gerg]

I installed NeoOffice recently, and it really is a decent substitute for Office. You can even export as Excel or Word documents so someone with Office can open them up, too.

It's Open Source, which is a good thing™

 

[MacsRgr8]

Why don't you give Mesa a try?
It's a Cocoa app, and cheap!