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7 comments

·May 23, 2025

ndegruchy

Comparison of Spreadsheets, advertisement for Grid.is.

I guess it really matters what you need. Is Numbers going to take over accounting firms? No, they need Excel because it's Excel and that's what they use. If you need a free spreadsheet program, there are plenty. Google Sheets, Numbers, LibreOffice, Gnumeric. They're not going to change the way you use spreadsheets, but they'll put shit in columns and calculate to varying degrees of accuracy. Which is what most folks want/need.

ctkhn

It's crazy that the original post didn't cover libreoffice at all. Back in high school my parents stopped buying office licenses for the family computers and as soon as I got a new laptop I moved to libre and it's been great for me making budgets etc but not anything investment banking level. Huge oversight to not even include it.

WillAdams

Curious why Quantrix Financial Modeler wasn't included?

https://quantrix.com/products/quantrix-modeler

pyspread would be another interesting comparison:

https://pyspread.gitlab.io/

Really though, spreadsheets don't so much need features per se, but a better interface which will scale to larger datasets and which reduces the likelihood of logical errors --- Quantrix, based on Lotus Improv is one of the few to do this.

jonathaneunice

“Based on Improv”? Really?! Makes me want to take an immediate look.

The Visicalc → 1-2-3 → Multiplan → Excel → Sheets progression? Mostly steady, incremental improvement. Some steps were great—like internet access and multi-user collaboration—but fundamentally, it’s a straight line. OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Numbers, etc.—they've all been basically just more increments on the same theme.

Only two spreadsheet approaches have ever struck me as _truly_ different. One was Improv. (The other was Xerox Analyst, built in Smalltalk for the intelligence community.)

WillAdams

Be seated when checking the pricing.

The opensource option is Flexisheet, but I don't believe it compiles anymore --- it running again would be quite the benison.

tantalor

  Google Sheets
  Can define custom/user-defined functions: no
Google sheets does support custom functions.

There are few options,

1. Named functions https://support.google.com/docs/answer/12504534?hl=en

2. Apps script https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/sheets/func...

lucas_membrane

MBA Analyst won a very early spreadsheet comparison vs visicalc and lotus123. NTSH.