Top Excel Alternatives With Similar Features
Excel is a well-known tool for spreadsheet management, data planning and calculation. It helps to store and analyze data, generate charts, perform calculations, and create templates.
This Microsoft product is still alive but at the same time Excel competitors advance and succeed.
Does it mean that the era of Excel is over? In this article, we share some powerful tools that are considered great Excel alternatives for projects from various industries, including software development. Let’s explore these solutions.
Why are people looking for Excel alternatives?
Microsoft Excel is one of the best tools for data crunching. However, there are many business processes and activities that could be performed more accurately and effectively with any alternative to Excel.
Here is the list of the reasons showing why people want to find an appropriate Excel alternative.
- Waste of time. Excel settings require a lot of thoughts and time. It can be difficult to drill-down and search for information with masses of data.
- Not accessible from anywhere.
- Lack of security. Excel users have no chance to track who makes changes or edits data. It makes them susceptible to security leaks and fraud.
- Weak collaboration.
- Poor reporting. MS Excel doesn’t look flexible in terms of reporting.
- Challenging to use for complex projects.
- The lack of project management features.
Also read about the power of an hourly Gantt chart Excel template
https://ganttpro.com/hourly-planner-template/.
Now let’s move on directly to categories of tools that can serve as good alternatives to Excel.
Alternative to Excel in the field of project management
Being a project management tool, Excel provides an extensive list of powerful features available to any spreadsheet user.
You can use it for planning tasks, tracking progress, and organizing data points related to budgets, timelines, and resources. You get a handy grid format and the ability to filter every kind of data to make it easy to use.
However, despite its extensive use in project management, the Microsoft product provides only superficial assistance, not solving many issues deeply.
Therefore, modern Excel alternatives can be used in different areas of project management including business strategy, project planning, event scheduling, data analysis, budget tracking, logistics, quality assurance, and others. Some alternative apps often become the best planners for project managers.
It is better to explore an example of such an alternative tool to better understand this.
Example: GanttPRO
GanttPRO replaces Excel when it comes to enhancing project management needs. The Gantt chart maker suits large enterprises and small businesses. It allows for creating a timeline and managing projects of various complexity.
GanttPRO lets its users plan projects, schedule tasks, manage resources, set milestones and dependencies, as well as collaborate with all stakeholders.
Businesses apply it to cover their needs in the IT sector, construction, design, marketing, sales, events, and many more spheres.
This powerful Excel alternative allows new users to get familiar features and opportunities that they used before the transition. They get a grid view on a timeline, using columns and bars. The tool also lets you count costs for the tasks by applying handy settings.
It’s also possible to import and export GanttPRO projects without any headache.
The Gantt chart generator offers:
- Professional planning and scheduling.
- Drag and drop task management.
- Deadlines and notifications.
- Resource/cost management.
- Time tracking.
- Importing/exporting.
- Reporting.
- The history of changes.
- Free trial.
- Helpful templates, and much more.
Popular Excel competitors
In case you want to find an alternative to Microsoft Excel for just spreadsheet use and without professional features to manage large projects, you may pick up some of the most vivid Excel rivals.
Below we describe some of them.
Example: Google Sheets
One of the most famous cloud-based analogues to Microsoft Excel is Google Sheets. The tool can perform the majority of activities the average Excel user requires.
Choosing Google Sheets, you save all your work in Google Drive.
The platform allows multiple users to edit their docs at the same time as well as see what they’re doing as they’re doing it, being able to chat in the document window. You also get pre-designed templates, friendly for presentations.
Example: LibreOffice Calc
Another popular Excel competitor is LibreOffice Calc.
The platform provides the overview people need to keep their projects on track and intuitive spreadsheet functions.
LibreOffice offers even more features than Excel. However, its pivot tables look limited with the formatting capability. Moreover, it lacks the ability to display many advanced types of charts.
This Excel alternative is available for Microsoft Windows, MacOS, and Linux.
Example: Zoho Sheet
Being a part of the Zoho Office Suite, Zoho Sheet allows teams to organize project data and generate detailed reports from any device.
This alternative to Microsoft Excel has powerful features including pivot tables comparable to Excel and functional online charts.
You can edit spreadsheets with team members simultaneously, making collaboration easy. With the Zoho software solution, you can chat with other users who are viewing or editing the same document as you and leave comments on certain cells.
Example: Quip
Quip perfectly suits the people who often deal with budgeting or data reporting.
This friendly alternative to Excel integrates with many software giving them additional features to manage projects.
One of its robust features is the capability to handle complex projects. That is why many famous companies apply this tool. For example, Facebook, CNN, and Pinterest.
Example: Gnumeric
Gnumeric is an open-source spreadsheet tool that suits any UNIX-based operating system.
It comes with great analytic features and superior accuracy. They make Gnumeriс a good choice for students, engineers, and scientists.
However, many admit that the tool has the old-fashioned interface.
Excel alternatives for Mac and Linux
There are many Mac Excel alternatives and its substitutions for Linux users. Many of them are both free and open source.
Here’s the top-5 best Excel Mac alternatives you can use to complete your tasks:
If you are a Linux user, you can also choose from multiple mature alternatives available on the market:
Free alternatives to Excel
The solution to find a free Excel alternative is commonly associated with the uncertainty of switching to a new paid tool. Many people strive to try free features and then decide what to do next.
Here are some Excel free alternatives you may consider:
Open source Excel alternatives
Excel open source alternatives are released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, and distribute these tools and their source code to anyone and for any purpose.
Here’re some of them:
Conclusion
And there you have it. Which tool looks most appealing to you?
There are plenty of online options for creating Excel-like spreadsheets. Hopefully, somewhere on our list, you’ve found one that feels like the right fit for you.
If not, explore some more powerful Excel alternative tools reading the full version of the article here: Tried-and-true Excel Alternatives for Everyday Use https://blog.ganttpro.com/en/excel-alternative-tools/.
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