An Excel alternative that opens your Excel files

Your files open, and they go back as .xlsx

Opens .xlsx, .xls, .xlsb, .ods, .csv, .tsv, .json, and .parquet. Import keeps every sheet, and brings across formulas, number formats, fonts, fills, borders, merged cells, conditional formatting, and data validation.

Exports to .xlsx, .csv, .tsv, and .json, and to PDF with a print preview. Formulas are written as formulas rather than pasted values, so the next person can still see how a number was calculated.

The .xlsx it writes is a presentation snapshot, not a full round trip: formulas, formatting, merges, frozen panes and validation come through, but anything VisiGrid does not model — charts and macros above all — does not survive a trip through it. It reads OpenDocument and Parquet without writing either.

The same grid, and the everyday tools

A sheet holds 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns — the same limits as Excel, so a file that fits there fits here.

Sorting, autofilter, frozen panes, data validation with dropdowns, conditional formatting, named ranges, find and replace, and dynamic arrays with FILTER, SORT, UNIQUE and XLOOKUP are all here, spill errors included.

Cell comments too, with a sidebar that searches every comment in the workbook. Comments travel to and from Excel as Notes, so the people you send the file to still see them.

Scrolling is rendered on the GPU, using the same framework as the Zed editor, so a large sheet moves at the speed of the scroll rather than the speed of the redraw.

Free, offline, and yours

Free and open source under AGPLv3, with nothing held back for a paid tier. A commercial licence is available for organisations that cannot use AGPL code.

No account, no sign-in, and no telemetry in the desktop app. It works with the network off, on a machine that will never be licensed for Office.

Install it with Homebrew, winget, the AUR, or a direct download.

Where Excel still wins

The desktop app has no chart engine. Not a simplified version — it does not exist. Its pivot tables are basic: row fields, one column field and six summaries, with none of Excel's slicers, calculated fields or PivotCharts. If your monthly work ends in a chart or a serious pivot, Excel is the right tool and this is not. (The browser app does draw charts; the desktop app does not.)

Printing is still catching up. There is a print preview, a print area, repeated header rows, page numbers, and page setup saved with the sheet, but sending pages straight to a printer works only on Linux for now; on macOS and Windows you print from the PDF it exports. Margins are fixed, and there are no custom headers and footers. There is no VBA and no macro recorder either — VisiGrid scripts in Lua, which runs headlessly in the CLI as well, so existing macros need rewriting rather than porting.

163 functions cover everyday spreadsheet work, but Excel has hundreds. LAMBDA, LET, FORECAST, TREND and much of the statistical library are absent, as are images in cells.