Free Excel?
- Thread starter WelshWood
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Office 365 is a good option, as mentioned, if you have to have MS Excel.
WelshWood said:live4ever said:
Not specifically no, just as long as I can create the same calculations and save them to my laptop
~WW
I think if you want it offline, then you'll want something like http://www.libreoffice.org/ or OpenOffice.
Google Docs is awesome though.
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www.openoffice.org
You can get a full suite of app's that are almost identical to MS Office and have interchangeable files.
Tom
You can get a full suite of app's that are almost identical to MS Office and have interchangeable files.
Tom
snodgrass23
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Wuffles said:
Agreed. Unless you think you'll have a lot of need for offline access, I would go with Google Docs. You can also setup offline access for those if using the Chrome browser.
Sparktrician
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Tom Bellemare said:
Open Office and Libre Office are nearly identical, being forked versions of the earlier Open Office as developed by Sun Microsystems before they were taken over by Oracle. Both are very competent products, although I prefer Libre Office due to frequent updates and bug fixes, and the no-cost model. They are allegedly MS Office-compatible, but porting some documents from one into the other is often a chancy effort. They work differently, so changing from one to the other carries a learning curve. Libre Office Calc works very closely to Excel, and is an excellent product, once you get past the frustrations of the learning curve.
OpenOffice has annoying problems that don't get fixed, go for LibreOffice, which as has already been mentioned is a fork of the same package - but it is leaps and bounds ahead of OpenOffice. I stuck with OO for years (after giving up on Micro$oft Office), getting annoyed with it's quirks - switched to LibreOffice after some research - not a single complaint!
bkharman
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I agree on Google Docs. It is so easy to integrate with and does most of what people need. If you need more "full function Excel", just get the real thing. Office 365 is close but doesn't do everything you might want.
In the states you can buy Excel 2013 for about $70.00 bucks.
Cheers. Bryan.
In the states you can buy Excel 2013 for about $70.00 bucks.
Cheers. Bryan.
benwheeler
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Google docs is particularly good if you need to use it on a mobile or tablet. Offline use is easy.
Mr Heavy
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[quote author=Sparktrician
Open Office and Libre Office are nearly identical, being forked versions of the earlier Open Office as developed by Sun Microsystems before they were taken over by Oracle. Both are very competent products, although I prefer Libre Office due to frequent updates and bug fixes, and the no-cost model. They are allegedly MS Office-compatible, but porting some documents from one into the other is often a chancy effort. They work differently, so changing from one to the other carries a learning curve. Libre Office Calc works very closely to Excel, and is an excellent product, once you get past the frustrations of the learning curve.
[/quote]
I concur absolutely. Great office environments though for Mac users – in my experience – the Libre is/was wayyyyy better.
There were indeed some compatibility issues with some of the more high-faluting Excel functions which caused problems for a friend who HAD to go back to Microsoft. His brother, strangely, couldn't abandon MS because of certain printing functions.
Personally, I'm not a spreadsheet power-user and had no problems of those kinds but neither O-O nor L-O would address the lack of outlining mode for authors, in spite of forum pressure and class pleading. I've therefore migrated entirely to Scrivener, abandoning the spreadsheet compatibility entirely for day-to-day use. O-O had become a very low priority for Sun, years ago, and the Libre team is much more responsive - at least it was when I last looked.
Sorry to digress but I wanted to maybe load the choice toward Libre if that's viable for the O.P. and explain why, though nothing comes close to Scrivener for writing and I like to bang the drum for them occasionally.
What I'd really like to see is a version of MSO that looked identical and behaved identically to the superb 1986 Word4 but running British English dictionaries on modern processors – without all the baggage of built-in drawing packages, incompetent web code generation, sat-nav, social media and bloat garbage that made us all want to leave it anyway. O-O really looked like they were going to do it for a while…
Try Libre Office. It'll probably do everything you want.
Open Office and Libre Office are nearly identical, being forked versions of the earlier Open Office as developed by Sun Microsystems before they were taken over by Oracle. Both are very competent products, although I prefer Libre Office due to frequent updates and bug fixes, and the no-cost model. They are allegedly MS Office-compatible, but porting some documents from one into the other is often a chancy effort. They work differently, so changing from one to the other carries a learning curve. Libre Office Calc works very closely to Excel, and is an excellent product, once you get past the frustrations of the learning curve.
[/quote]
I concur absolutely. Great office environments though for Mac users – in my experience – the Libre is/was wayyyyy better.
There were indeed some compatibility issues with some of the more high-faluting Excel functions which caused problems for a friend who HAD to go back to Microsoft. His brother, strangely, couldn't abandon MS because of certain printing functions.
Personally, I'm not a spreadsheet power-user and had no problems of those kinds but neither O-O nor L-O would address the lack of outlining mode for authors, in spite of forum pressure and class pleading. I've therefore migrated entirely to Scrivener, abandoning the spreadsheet compatibility entirely for day-to-day use. O-O had become a very low priority for Sun, years ago, and the Libre team is much more responsive - at least it was when I last looked.
Sorry to digress but I wanted to maybe load the choice toward Libre if that's viable for the O.P. and explain why, though nothing comes close to Scrivener for writing and I like to bang the drum for them occasionally.
What I'd really like to see is a version of MSO that looked identical and behaved identically to the superb 1986 Word4 but running British English dictionaries on modern processors – without all the baggage of built-in drawing packages, incompetent web code generation, sat-nav, social media and bloat garbage that made us all want to leave it anyway. O-O really looked like they were going to do it for a while…
Try Libre Office. It'll probably do everything you want.
WelshWood said:
Excel online is free (as are the other Office online apps):
https://office.live.com/start/Excel.aspx
Pretty good functionality and free (15GB) storage on Onedrive.
Google Docs and other such things puts your data "in the cloud" making it more accessible to large-scale hacking efforts and the like.
I don't trust those things with any data I don't want being made public.
OpenOffice.org / LibreOffice are better suggestions.
I don't trust those things with any data I don't want being made public.
OpenOffice.org / LibreOffice are better suggestions.
bkharman
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fdengel said:
Comments like this are what rips fear through my industry... I am not going to get into another one of these conversations but this is off base matey.
Almost anything is "hack-able". If you invest the right time and know how, you can accomplish about anything. Your data on you PC or laptop is at risk as well. I don't care if people don't want to adopt things that exist in "the cloud" but the skepticism is being invalidated daily. I for one am very happy, as it expands my customer base immensely!
You and I do agree that you should not make a spreadsheet with all of your personal info and plop it anywhere you think is at risk... But there is a fine line between common sense and paranoia.
Between me and my employees, we have thousands of "very important" documents floating around in the cloud. I don't worry about it one bit. We also have an ever growing pool of customers (about 25,000 per month) that do the same.
Sorry to get into a bit of a rant... But it is the world we live in and it will not be going away.
Cheers. Bryan.
Sparktrician
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bkharman said:
To depend on "the cloud" is all well and good, when you have access to "the cloud". There are times when, for a number of reasons, that isn't a realistic possibility. In those times, it's quite nice to have reliable applications and data where I can get to them, work on/with them, present them to my customers, etc. I don't see "the cloud" going away either, Bryan, but I'm a belt-and-suspenders kind of guy with some unusual customer requirements from time-to-time, and I need to be able to retrieve and work with my documents right now, not when "the cloud" floats back over. And yes, I even go so far as to carry a fully synced backup hard drive at times, just in case.
