Best NON-Microsoft spreadsheet?

[Tony B2]

pistonheadforum said:

LibreOffice will do pretty much all your spreadsheeting needs unless it's a particular Excel-ism you need. If that's the case you need to suck it up or get an older version before it went all subscriptiony and you can then use local files.

I have Office for Mac, on a one-time licence (purchased 2019, not subscription) and therefore all my files are local.

My problem is that it seems very flakey at times, and this has resulted in me losing much work, too many times.

And I have set autorecover for every 5 minutes but - for some reason - this quite clearly does not always work.

I assume that this is a bug.

Edited by Tony B2 on Wednesday 14th February 00:52

[Percy Cushion]

As you already have a Mac, have you tried Apple Numbers?

[ecsrobin]

Percy Cushion said:

As you already have a Mac, have you tried Apple Numbers?

This, Apple numbers, pages, and keynote are all free.

[steveatesh]

ecsrobin said:

Percy Cushion said:

As you already have a Mac, have you tried Apple Numbers?

This, Apple numbers, pages, and keynote are all free.

Got to say I use Apple numbers, pages and keynote without problem, never touched MS products for years and years and that’s for a small business too.

[camel_landy]

Another vote for LibreOffice from me.

Not sure about Android options but I use it happily on a Mac. I tried the built in Pages & Numbers apps but it's simply too different, especially if you have to share those documents with others.

HTH

M

[vaud]

Tony B2 said:

Is this on a Mac?

Yes. Current Excel model is 365mb and auto calc is on. Macbook Pro M3 16gb.

[Baldchap]

I used Excel for the majority of my IT career to a very high standard and never got on with anything else.

Given a lifetime Office Pro (offline) license can be had for £20, I don't know why you'd bother looking at alternatives.

[Tony B2]

Baldchap said:

I used Excel for the majority of my IT career to a very high standard and never got on with anything else.

Given a lifetime Office Pro (offline) license can be had for £20, I don't know why you'd bother looking at alternatives.

I have a lifetime licence now.

The only reason I am seeking alternatives is that Excel has crashed - and lost data - too many times for my liking in recent months.

And this is with Autorecover enabled.

Maybe I have something amiss in my installation (MacOS Catalina 10.15.7, Excel 16.66.1) as "Browse Version History" is greyed out on my "File" menu - any ideas why this might be?

When I have used File Manager to attempt to find Autorecover files, there is nothing in the normal location.

[Tony B2]

steveatesh said:

ecsrobin said:

Percy Cushion said:

As you already have a Mac, have you tried Apple Numbers?

This, Apple numbers, pages, and keynote are all free.

Got to say I use Apple numbers, pages and keynote without problem, never touched MS products for years and years and that’s for a small business too.

The last time I tried Numbers, it was pretty feeble on conditional formatting, and handling formulae, but this was a few years ago.

Maybe it has improved since?

[CharlesElliott]

You should look at Excel 365, and just save stuff locally. I assume your purchased version is an old one, ie hasn't been updated.

If you really don't want Excel, then Numbers will be your best option.

Nothing else is going to have all the features of Excel, so you will need to decide what compromise you are preapred to make.

Note that both Numbers and Excel 365 are cloud-centric, although you don't have to save in Cloud.

ETA: 16.66.1 is from October 12, 2022. Current is 16.82.

ETA: Catalina ended suport in November, 2022.

Edited by CharlesElliott on Wednesday 14th February 14:17

Edited by CharlesElliott on Wednesday 14th February 14:19

[biggiles]

Tony B2 said:

Maybe I have something amiss in my installation (MacOS Catalina 10.15.7, Excel 16.66.1) as "Browse Version History" is greyed out on my "File" menu - any ideas why this might be?

In Windows world, this is optimised for files on Onedrive/Sharepoint. MS gives free Onedrive storage space, try using it. It's pretty hard to lose xls data these days, the personal version of Onedrive stores the last 25 versions (I just looked it up).

[adamfawsitt]

Numbers - used it for a decade now and it's flawless. I would never go back to Excel.