Microsoft Excel is the world's leading spreadsheet application, and it's the one by which all others are measured. However, having the Microsoft brand on your small business software can be costly. If you're looking for a no-cost Excel alternative, you have plenty of free applications to choose from including small business apps that operate in the cloud In this roundup, we'll look at four free Excel alternatives—one of which is a free version of Excel itself. They're all solid, quality spreadsheet tools that, depending on your small business's needs, can readily replace Excel and save you money. Let's take a look at their capabilities and limitations. Includes a spreadsheet component called Google Sheets.
These Google Drive applications are cloud based, so you need a good, consistent connection to the Internet to use them. Google Sheets includes what you would expect to find in data-entry and formatting tools and the formulas you would expect it to support. It offers Data Validation similar to Excel and PivotTables. The charting feature is pretty standard for the applications we're looking at - none of these spreadsheet alternatives offer great-looking charts to match the look of the new charting engine in Excel 2007/2010/2013 (except the Excel Web App), but they all offer standard charts. However Google Sheets does have a built in Map charting tool which lets you chart data on a map.
Charts in Google Sheets can be added to a worksheet or later moved to a sheet on their own. Also unique to Google sheets is the ability to create a survey or an invitation that you can publish to the Web or email. The replies from these forms are automatically assembled for you in a worksheet.
I made the switch from PC to Mac about a year ago and although there are some nuances to running Excel on the Mac verse a PC, you will get used to it once you learn the shortcuts as you probably use on the PC.
Is an open source office application, and is available for a range of operating systems including Linux, Mac and Windows. This makes it attractive for a small business that uses a mix of operating systems. The program includes a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentations tool, database manager and a drawing tool. The spreadsheet component of OpenOffice is called Calc. Like Google Sheet, it provides most of the tools that you would need in a spreadsheet program including charts, a PivotTable tool and macros. OpenOffice is popular with organizations seeking quality small business software with built-in Microsoft compatibility but without the high price of licensing actual Microsoft products. OpenOffice is a downloadable program that you install on your local computer, and there is also Apache OpenOffice Portable—an app that you can load onto a Flash drive to take it with you.
Because Calc runs locally, you don't need an Internet connection to access the spreadsheet. Calc supports up to 1,024 columns of data and 1,048,576 rows, it can export worksheets as.pdf files, save to the Excel 2003 format; and it can open the newer.xlsx format files. While charts in Calc don't have the look of Excel's, more sophisticated formatting options - including plotting charts using two axes—are available for them than for the other applications in this roundup. The second cloud application in this round up is. Some of the Zoho small business apps are free and others require payment. Once you've signed in for a free account, select Zoho Sheet to launch the free spreadsheet tool. In Zoho, all the applications are separate, so there is no dashboard style interface that gives you access to everything.
In this way, Zoho operates similarly to Excel and unlike Google Docs. Zoho resembles the new Excel with tabs and a narrow ribbon toolbar containing icons—most of which will be familiar to Excel users. Icons include Sort, Insert Function, a Chart tool and an AutoSum function. You can open files from your local computer by choosing File Import Local File, you can import a sheet from a URL or work on a file that you have already created in Zoho.
The charting tools in Zoho are pretty much similar to those you would have found in Excel 2003. You can create pivot tables and pivot charts using a tool that works similarly to the PivotTable creation tool in Excel 2003. You can create a macro in Zoho Sheet that you can then play back later on and the code is recorded using VBA—this will be familiar to you if you've done any work with VBA or VB previously. You can embed worksheets inside a web page or blog, and you can make them public and share them with others.
If you're looking for the tools that Zoho provides, then this smart, quick and easy-to-use application won't overburden you with features you're never likely to use. The —Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint, Outlook, Sway and Word—are all free and all you need to use them is a Microsoft account. These cloud-based small business applications are cut-down versions of their offline equivalents, so you don’t get access to full Excel compatibility online, but you get a good range of its features.
You can open files saved in the new.xlsx and.xlsm formats and view the workbooks even if you can't use some of the features included in them. For example you can view but not edit Sparklines, but you can't access shapes and VBA code. However you can edit the data that the Sparklines are based on and the Sparklines will update accordingly. Excel Online gives you a means to create Excel worksheets that you can share and collaborate on with others. You can upload worksheets from your local machine and download them into an offline version of Excel, and you can share worksheets with other people online. Like Zoho and Google Sheets, you will need access to a fast Internet connection for this browser-based app.
If you don't want to shell out money for a full version of Microsoft Office, and if you can live with the subset of features included in Excel Online, then it might be a viable application to consider.
And give it a thumbs up. Big Update to the VB Editor for Mac I know many Mac users have been waiting along time for this, and I'm excited to share that an update to the VB Editor is finally here! Microsoft just released a new build of Excel that contains a new VB Editor, which we use to write VBA macros in Excel.
The new VB Editor contains a lot of the features we are used to seeing in the Windows versions of Excel, or Excel 2011 for Mac. In the video above I highlight some of the many new improvements to the editor. Here is a list of the major new features. Intellisense drop-down menus for auto-filling code. Toolbars with buttons to for commands like: indenting, comment blocks, run, reset (stop), step into, etc. VBA Project, Properties, Immediate, Locals, and Watch windows.
Debugging features and options. Keyboard shortcuts listed next to each command on the top menus. This new VB Editor feels a lot more like the VB Editor we are used to on the Windows version of Excel. The one notable feature that is missing right now is userforms. The latest version (7.1) does not have any features that allow you to create, modify, or even view an existing userform.
I'm hoping that will be updated in the near future as well. You can on the Excel UserVoice site. Microsoft uses this site to help prioritize feature updates, so please vote there if you want userforms back. Even with the absence of userforms, this new VB Editor is a huge leap forward from the editor that was originally shipped with Excel 2016 for Mac.
If you are a Mac user, you will now be able to write macros to help you automate Excel and save time with your job. If you are new to macros or want to learn more, checkout my upcoming. Get the Office Insiders Fast Pre-Release Build Important Note: You no longer need the Insiders Fast build to get the new VB Editor. You might just need to update Office which can be done from the Help Check for Updates menu. Here is the page with the that lists all the recent updates.
To get the updated version you will need to be on an Office 365 subscription and on the Office Insiders Fast Program. That program is free to join and open to everyone. It allows you to download and install pre-release builds of Excel.
The latest build is 16.6 at the time of this writing, and it includes PivotCharts and a new VB Editor for writing VBA macros. Two awesome updates for Mac users. It's really easy to do! Help Microsoft with Feedback As part of the Pre-release Program, Microsoft would love to get your feedback on how to make pivot charts better.
If you find any bugs or have any suggestions you can provide feedback by:. Clicking the smiley face icon in the top-right corner of Excel. Click the “Tell Us What Can Be Better” option.
Complete the form and hit Send. The Excel development team will receive the feedback and use it to make Excel even better. If you are excited about this update, please leave a comment below and let us know. August 4, 2018 Yikes!
And thanks Ian! ? Just to clarify, I was referring to the VB Editor that was originally shipped with Excel 2016 for Mac. It wasn’t much of an editor and looked like the following. No toolbars or debugging capabilities. This new editor is definitely a step forward, even with the absence of userforms. I realize that Excel 2011 for Mac did have userforms, so compared to that it is still lacking features. You can run userforms on the Excel 2016 for Mac.
They will just have to be developed in either a Windows version or Excel 2011. I realize this is frustrating if you are only using Macs. In the past I have used Parallels on a Mac to run Windows, and it worked great. This is another option if you want to get the best of both worlds. Yes, it will come at a price, and no, I don’t get paid by Microsoft.
I hope that helps. August 4, 2018 You can also vote for the userforms feature on the Excel UserVoice site. Here is a link to that page.
I added a link in the article above as well. Microsoft uses that site to help prioritize updates based on votes.
I think it’s also important to note that Macs still only make up about 8%-10% of total market share for personal computers. And MS and Apple are still competitors. So those two factors will probably always give priority to Windows versions of Office. Don’t get me wrong. I love Apple products too. Our house is full of them. We just can’t expect our sports car to be good at off roading ?.
Mark - January 9, 2018 Hi Jon, Thanks for your video above. I’m contemplating moving from PC to Mac, and trying (without much success) to understand how complete the VBA implementation is in Mac Office 2016. I recently tested an xlsm file I wrote in PC Excel 2007 on a friend’s Mac Office 2016, and it choked on trying to create a Word file from within Excel. This uses the lines: Set objWord = CreateObject(“Word.Application”) Set objDoc = objWord.Documents.Add Is there a newer way to do this in the most recent Mac implementation? I read something about sandboxing on the Mac Office, which makes me think “no”. Wondering in general how complete the port of Excel VBA was to the Mac version.