5 Free alternatives to Microsoft Excel – If you don’t want to spend money on Microsoft Excel, we have five free alternatives for you here.
Spreadsheets are part of the modern business world and you will probably have to work with them sooner or later. The functions you need for this are mostly limited to a minimum. Many Excel users do not use many of the extensive functions or often do not know that they even exist. So why spend so much money on the software when you don’t use half of it properly? It doesn’t have to be with these five alternatives.
- Google Sheets
- Microsoft Office Excel Online
- Apache OpenOffice Calc
- LibreOffice Calc
- WPS Office Spreadsheets
Also Read : Google Sheets are not Excel.Here are 5 tricks you didn’t know about
Table of Contents
Google Sheets
Sheets is Google’s cloud-based answer to Microsoft Excel and can meet most of the needs of an average Excel user. In addition, it is hosted in the cloud and run in a web browser, making it device and platform independent and can be used on Windows, macOS and Linux systems.
You also don’t have to worry about losing important calculations and data when using Google Sheets. The software stores every change in Google Drive, so that even crashing your computer has no effect on your work. As with other Google office tools, Google Sheets offers real-time collaboration where multiple users can edit a document at the same time. Users can see other people’s cursor positions in the document and chat with each other directly in the document window.
However, advanced features that some Excel users need are missing. So before you switch, you should find out if the features you need are available. Problems with Excel formulas were also reported, which no longer worked when uploading to Google Sheets.
Microsoft Office Excel Online
In order not to be surpassed by Google, Microsoft has created its own online version of Office, which contains a stripped down version of Excel. Of course, this version is very similar to the Excel of the Office Suite. So if you prefer a familiar user interface, you should opt for Excel Online rather than choosing the Google route.
Excel Online is a good recommendation for an average Excel user. It performs all the basic functions of the desktop version and adds one more thing with the automatic saving in OneDrive. It also has real-time collaboration tools that Office 365 lacks.
Excel power users should, however, stay away from the online version. Many of the features you rely on are unavailable, restricted, or even read-only. There is no VBA scripting, no external data connections and no extended diagram functions.
Apache OpenOffice Calc
If you don’t like the appearance of the Microsoft Office user interface after 2007 at all, we recommend Apache OpenOffice . Calc, OpenOffice’s Excel alternative, does a good job and feels like Office 2003 in use. This is great if you prefer the time before the Office ribbon.
Before the advent of Google’s office tools, OpenOffice was the go-to address for those looking for a free Microsoft Office alternative. This is especially true for Calc, which retains most of the key advanced features of Microsoft Excel, albeit in slightly different forms in some cases.
If you are an Excel power user thinking about migrating to OpenOffice, be sure to read the user guide. It will help you to find out whether the functions that are important for your work are available in Calc.
However, there is one major disadvantage of OpenOffice: lack of cloud support. If real-time collaboration is essential for you, this software is not suitable.
LibreOffice Calc
Like OpenOffice, LibreOffice is a free office suite with its own Excel alternative, also known as Calc. It is subject to the same restrictions as OpenOffice, since LibreOffice offers no cloud support and no real-time collaboration.
What LibreOffice does, however, is a surprisingly robust list of features, not all of which are available in Excel. It can compare two separate spreadsheets, offers more cell formatting options, and can even handle the import of older spreadsheets from older applications.
But there are also negative points: ELibreOffice has limited macro recording capabilities, cannot process external data sources, is not able to display many advanced diagram types and cannot export documents as XML files.
WPS Office Spreadsheets
When it comes to robust functions that really compete with Excel, WPS Office tables are a good alternative. WPS is actually a paid product, but it does provide a free full version. With a catch, of course: advertising.
But don’t let that stop you from creating WPS tables. Ads will only appear if you are printing something, want to save your document as a PDF, or use some of the other special tools. However, if you want to get rid of the advertising, you have to pay a one-time fee of around 80 $. This makes WPS significantly cheaper than Microsoft’s Office, which amounts to around $ 150.
WPS is 100% compatible with Excel. This means that all Excel documents can be opened and all files contained therein are supported. If you have any concerns, you can search for specific features on the official website. In this way you can ensure that all the functions you need are planned.
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