Microsoft Excel is one of the most powerful yet popular tools used in offices. Whether you have to keep records of daily tasks in a company or records of your business, spreadsheets have become an integral part of modern businesses. Whether you are a school or college student or teacher or a corporate employee, spreadsheets play a significant role in our daily work lives. It is a powerful tool which offers ample features like record keeping, sheets, formulas etc. But Microsoft Excel works with a license and is definitely an expensive option to work with. But with many options launching.
Here are a list of 4 alternatives you can switch to which are free, affordable and boosts productivity:
- Google Sheets
Google Sheet, the company's cloud-based alternative to Microsoft Excel, can perform the vast majority of tasks that the typical Excel user requires. It can be used on Windows, macOS, and Linux systems because it is platform independent and runs in a web browser that is hosted in the cloud.
Additionally, Google Sheets automatically saves all of your calculations to Google Drive, so you never have to worry about losing any of your crucial data in the event of a computer crash.
Google Sheets offers real-time collaboration so that multiple users can edit a document concurrently, just like Google's other office tools. Users can directly chat while viewing other users' cursor positions and seeing what they're doing in the document.
2. Zoho Sheets
With the collaboration, data visualization, and automation features found in Zoho Sheet, teams can complete tasks more quickly. It's simple to import your current spreadsheets into Zoho Sheet because it supports a variety of file formats, including Excel (.xls),.csv,.ods, and.tsv. With real-time updates at the sheet level for any users in the document, collaboration in Zoho Sheet is simple. To automate updates and accelerate work, use macros and even VBA code. To ensure that errors are found quickly, collaborators can use Data cleaning or use Version History to go back to a previous iteration. Additionally, Zoho Sheet is simple to use on mobile devices and can be published to the web with fine-grained controls over embedded data manipulation.
Since Zoho Sheet is a member of the larger Zoho family of apps, extensions and integrations are quick and simple. Utilize Zoho Forms to quickly combine data into one Sheet, and Zia, Zoho's AI, will assist teams in visualizing data through pivot tables, charts, or graphs.
3. Microsoft Office Excel Online
A stripped-down version of Excel that is more similar to Google Sheets than the desktop version of Excel is part of Microsoft's own online version of Office.
For the typical Excel user, Excel Online works just fine. It performs all the same functions as the desktop version while also automatically saving work to OneDrive and offering real-time collaboration tools that Office 365 and Office 2019 do not.
But here's the catch! Excel Online might not be a good choice for Excel power users. There aren't any VBA scripting capabilities, you can't create external data connections, you can't use find and replace, and there aren't any sophisticated charting features—many of the features Excel power users depend on are gone, restricted, or read-only. Excel Online has all of those features, but they are read-only.
4. WPS Office Spreadsheets
WPS Office Spreadsheets is unrivaled in terms of robust features that can truly compete with Excel, and for good reason—it's the only freemium product on this list. Although WPS Office is a paid product, it does have a fully functional free version with the caveat that it is ad supported.
