In the business world, MS Excel is the most widely used tool of data categorization and management. It seems impossible for a company to sustain itself without the use of MS Excel. Due to its lightweight interface and effective commands, most professionals love it. In case you didn’t like Excel that much and wish to try another tool, here are the top 5 MS Excel alternatives.
List of Best MS Excel Alternatives
Scoro
Scoro is a data analytics and information management software that is quite innovative and responsive. It allows a user to integrate with third-party applications to import data in one place. Unlike MS Excel, Scoro can display beautiful visual charts for data representation. This makes understanding and analyzing the data much easier and effortless. With its interactive dashboard and KPIs(Key Performance Indicators), one can easily keep track of their projects and tasks.
Though Scoro displays charts and graphs, the experts do not prefer it for financial analytics. You can get access to Score from here.
Google Sheets
Google Sheets is one of the best alternatives to MS Excel due to its easy-to-use interface and high accessibility. Based on the look and feel of Google Sheets, it won’t be a lie if I said it is similar to MS Excel. On the contrary to the latter, the former comes free of cost. All you need to do is have a Gmail account.
Some of the popular and the most important features of Google Sheets are as follows.
- Apps Scripts: Google Sheets allows you to do extra programming through JavaScript to run the scripts and connect to Application Programming Interfaces, aka APIs.
- Collaboration: You can share the files that you create and work on with multiple people to view and/or edit online. This enables collaboration and teamwork which isn’t possible with MS Excel. Just so you know, you will have to save the file in MS Excel and send it to a teammate through a medium to work on it collaboratively.
- Cloud Storage: Your files get stored on the cloud. This means that you can access your files from anywhere as long as you have an internet connection and a device. If you have to access your files from another device, Google Sheets is your tool.
LibreOffice
LibreOffice is a free and open-source tool that is great if you want to replace MS Excel. LibreOffice can replace not just Excel but the whole MS Office suite as the former comes with a complete set of tools itself. It was derived from OpenOffice.org.
LibreOffice is somewhat similar in its user interface to MS Excel. It even has excel features like text-to-columns and pivot tables. For personal usage, this can be your preferred tool but we would not recommend this for business analysis.
Excel Web Application
An online version of MS Excel is available by the name of Excel Web Application. Microsoft has done so to provide a set of online tools for the users to create, view, edit, and store their documents on the cloud. The files thus created can be shared with your colleagues as well, hence making this tool equivalent to Google Sheets.
MS Excel Web Application allows sharing and coworking on a document indefinitely. You can grant access to your document to your colleagues which eliminates the need of uploading and downloading the document.
Zoho Sheet
Yet another alternative to MS Excel is Zoho Sheet that works pretty much the same as Google Sheets. It provides an interface similar to MS Excel and allows you to work on your documents online. You guessed it right. You can access your files from any device at any time. The supported file extensions are .xls, .xlsx, .csv, and .ods.
To add more to it, Zoho Sheet also supports charts, graphs, and pivot tables for visual relief and appeal. All these features make Zoho Sheet the best alternative to MS Excel according to us.
Some Honourable Mentions
Apart from the above tools, there are a few more that could be considered as data analysis tools. These are great sets of tools that give quite a competition to each other. They are as follows.
- Numbers for Mac
- Gnumeric
- Apache OpenOffice
- WPS Office Spreadsheets
- Bime
- Thinkfree