← All posts

Free Excel alternatives: what they can and can't do.

THE GRIDPATH TEAM · JULY 10, 2026

We built GridPath on top of an open-source spreadsheet engine (Univer), so we've spent a long time in the guts of what free spreadsheet software can and can't do. This is the honest version — where the free tools genuinely win, and where Excel is still the king.

First, "free" means four different things

People say "free Excel alternative" and mean wildly different products. It's worth separating them, because they fail in different places:

• Desktop suites — LibreOffice Calc, OnlyOffice Desktop, Gnumeric. Install-and-own, offline, your files stay on your disk.
• Cloud sheets — Google Sheets, Zoho Sheet, OnlyOffice / Collabora Online. Free to use, live collaboration, but your data lives on someone else's server.
• Database-spreadsheet hybrids — Airtable, Baserow, NocoDB, Grist. Great for structured records, not really a replacement for a formula-heavy model.
• Engines and libraries — Univer, SheetJS, Luckysheet, HandsOnTable. Not apps you hand to a colleague; building blocks developers embed in their own products. (This is the category GridPath is built on.)

The rest of this post is mostly about the first two, because that's what most people mean when they want to stop paying for Microsoft 365.

What the free tools are genuinely great at

Everyday spreadsheets — they're just fine now

For the 80% of spreadsheet work that is a table of numbers, some =SUM and =VLOOKUP, a chart, and a print layout, LibreOffice Calc is genuinely good. It's a mature, actively developed desktop app, it opens and saves .xlsx, and it now supports the same ~1,048,576-row limit as Excel. Most people who "switch to LibreOffice" never hit a wall.

Collaboration — Google Sheets is better than Excel here

This is the one place a free tool clearly beats desktop Excel: multiple people editing the same sheet live, comment threads, version history, and a shareable link. Excel's co-authoring works but it's fiddly by comparison. If your work is a shared tracker, a lightweight CRM, or a form-fed dataset, Google Sheets is often the right answer, not just the free one.

Formula compatibility — closer than you'd expect

The core function library — lookups, logicals, text, date/time, statistical, the modern dynamic-array functions like FILTER and XLOOKUP — is broadly there across LibreOffice and Google Sheets. A model that lives on formulas usually round-trips without drama.

Automation exists — just not VBA

LibreOffice has Basic and Python macros; Google Sheets has Apps Script. You can automate. What you can't do is drop in an existing Excel VBA macro and expect it to run — more on that below.

Where Excel is still the king

Being honest about this is the whole point. These aren't nitpicks; they're the reasons finance teams, analysts, and anyone with a serious workbook stay on Excel.

1. The data model: Power Query and Power Pivot

This is the big one. Excel's Power Query (ETL — pull, clean, and reshape data from dozens of sources) and Power Pivot with DAX (an in-memory analytics engine over millions of rows) have no real free-tool equivalent. LibreOffice and Google Sheets can approximate pieces of it with imports and pivot tables, but nothing matches the end-to-end refreshable pipeline. If your workflow depends on this, you're not leaving Excel.

2. Pivot tables at depth and speed

Everyone has pivot tables. Excel's are faster on large data, handle more edge cases, and survive round-trips intact. LibreOffice pivot tables (still labelled "Pivot Table," formerly "DataPilot") work but feel a generation behind; Google Sheets pivots are fine until the dataset gets big, then they crawl.

3. VBA and the add-in ecosystem

Twenty years of corporate macros are written in VBA, and they do not port cleanly. LibreOffice reads some VBA but silently mistranslates enough of it that "mostly works" becomes a debugging project. And the entire commercial add-in world — financial-modeling toolkits, Bloomberg / Capital IQ / FactSet plugins, Solver extensions — is built for Excel and only Excel.

4. Performance and scale on heavy workbooks

Excel's calculation engine is multithreaded and brutally optimized. A 50-sheet workbook with tens of thousands of formulas that Excel recalcs instantly can make a free tool stutter or choke. Google Sheets has a hard ceiling (10 million cells) and slows noticeably well before it. For big models, Excel just holds up better.

5. Rendering fidelity on complex files

This is where we have first-hand scars. A workbook is more than cells: charts, conditional-formatting rules, drawings, pivot caches, themes, merged cells, freeze panes. Free tools can store all of that correctly, but rendering it pixel-for-pixel like Excel is genuinely hard. Open a heavily-formatted file in another tool and something usually shifts — a chart re-lays out, a color rule drops, a drawing moves. The data's intact; the picture isn't always.

We hit this ourselves. GridPath's grid preserves charts, conditional formatting, named ranges, merged cells, and pivot tables in the file perfectly on save — but our in-app view doesn't paint charts or pivots live while you edit. That's not us being lazy; it's the honest cost of building on an open engine instead of Excel's closed one.

6. It's the default everyone expects

The least technical reason and often the most decisive: when you send a file to a client, a bank, or your CFO, they open it in Excel. Any rendering difference becomes your problem. Compatibility runs one way, and Excel is the reference implementation.

So what should you actually use?

• Personal budgets, simple tables, one-off analysis — LibreOffice Calc. Free, offline, more than enough.
• Shared trackers, collaborative data, forms — Google Sheets. The collaboration alone justifies it.
• Serious financial models, Power Query pipelines, VBA-heavy workflows, files you send to outside parties — stay on Excel. It's still the king, and pretending otherwise wastes your afternoon.
• Building a spreadsheet into your own product — an engine like Univer or SheetJS, not an end-user app.

The free alternatives aren't second-rate. They're excellent at what they're built for and honest about what they're not. The mistake is expecting any single tool to be all of them at once.