[egghead]

Hi all,

Anybody a decent spreadsheet for Mac OS X? I have been using AppleWorks, but it's not really good for much more than the most basic stuff. I'd get Excel if it existed as a standalone product, but I don't need the rest of Office and don't really want to support Micro$oft. Are there any other decent alternatives?

Thanks in advance,

Nike

[cpac]

There's the various versions of OpenOffice, which are free, but which look like they're being run on Windows and (depending on the version you want to use) may require you to do things like install X11, &c.

Really, Excel (IMO) is one of the few apps that Microsoft did right (which is not to say it doesn't have bugs - just that other competitors were always crappy imitations). You can buy it as a stand-alone (or at least you could buy the v.X version as a standalone) though generally the price point was so high you were better off buying Office anyway...

[Mr Heliums]

I think you have to offer a bit more detail about what you need it to do. I've used spreadsheets for years and rarely come across something I couldn't do in AW - pivot tables being an exception.

Mariner does a decent spreadsheet at low cost, but what does AW not do?

[JKT]

You could download NeoOffice/J - it is a highly capable MS Office replacement based on the OpenOffice.org code that runs natively in OS X. Its interface is indeed a little quirky (but so is MS Office's) and is inherently ugly (although you can improve it - there is a thread at the trinity forums which tells you how), but it is as good a replacement for Office as you are going to get... and it is free:



The last officially stable version was v0.8.4, but you will probably find the current v1.1 alpha 2 build is fine (I've been using it with very few problems and it is stable AFAICT). The difference between the two is that v0.8.4 is based on OOo 1.0.3 and v1.1 is an update to the latest OOo 1.1.2 code.