Have you tried the google docs sheet? A lot of Excel lovers seem to like it.

TAForObvReasons · on Jan 12, 2017

Many of the files are XLSB, which is like XLSX except it stores sheets in a binary format. For reasonably large files, opening XLSB is much faster than XLSX.

Google Sheets straight up fails if you try to upload files in that format. No preview available and no option to work around. So I would have to open the file in Excel anyway.

Relatively new versions of LibreOffice are capable of opening simple files, but once you get into features like named ranges LO fails.

So even if the UI is acceptable, failures on data import force me to keep a copy of Excel around. Keep a VM with Excel for Windows around just in case files don't work in Excel for Mac, but I've used it maybe once in the last 6 months.

abhimskywalker · on Jan 12, 2017

Yep. It's almost there. Used to use excel a lot earlier (on Windows) in data science job. Now have excel on Mac, but google spreadsheets mostly gets the job done on most occasions. (Now I am mostly a programmer/product guy) A few problems I have encountered with google spreadsheet: 1. Sharing some stuff with third parties who exclusively use Windows and just want an excel. 2. Speed of working with all the keyboard shortcuts still seems better in desktop excel as compared to google spreadsheet (but I am happy with the progress of how many of those same shortcuts now work on google spreadsheets).