Advertisement Share This Story Get our newsletter Subscribe More from Lifehacker How to Talk to a Real Human at the IRS Without Waiting on Hold Forever How to Tap Your Network and See Everything That Happens On It How to Find Your Local and External IP Address Pour Hot Bacon Grease on Fresh Tomatoes DISCUSSION JiveMasterT 121911 2:05PM Really All of MS Office for Mac is especially terrible.

Advertisement Microsoft Excel 2011 Platform: Mac OS X Price: 120-200 (Part of Microsoft Office) Download Page Features Create spreadsheets with integrated equations Create attractive graphs from your data Organize and filter your tables Create thumbnail-sized sparkline charts for viewing data at a glance Visually enhance your data with boards, highlighting, and more Automatically summarize your data with PivotTables Use VisualBasic to create macros and add additional functionality to Excel Use Excels Automator actions to automate repetitive tasks The Excel Web App will let you access your spreadsheets from anywhere Comprehensive toolbar with the most commonly-used features Easily filter data so youre not distracted by data you dont need to see Where It Excels Excel is an incredibly feature-rich application, to the point where it can even get a little overwhelming, while still offering simple spreadsheet functionality.

If you know how to type data into boxes and perform calculations in any spreadsheet app you know how to do it in Excel.

You dont have to dive into anything too deep to perform the most common tasks.

Graph and chart creation is also very easy, as those buttons are readily available in your toolbar.

While Apple touts the beauty of Numbers, its spreadsheet application (see the competition section below for more information), Excel is highly capable of creating attractive images as well.

Advertisement Where It Falls Short Excel is really a spreadsheet app for power users, so it may be overwhelming for some.

Its also been around for many years and its hard to keep adding new, useful features to an app that already does its job well.

Finding what youre looking for can be tough because there is so much there.

GO Media may get a commission TaoTronics 1500W Ceramic Heater Buy for 46 from TaoTronics Use the promo code WARM006 Assuming you get past the learning curve, one of the more annoying issues with Excel for Mac is that its different from Excel for Windows.

While the applications are very similar, theyre developed by different departments and often times the Windows version ends up with features and functionality that arent present in the Mac version (and vice-versa).

The most notable feature to have this problem is macro support.

Macro support is finally back in Excel 2011 for Mac, but its both been included and removed from versions in the past.

Missing features can be a minor annoyance for some and a major one for others, so before you jump into Excel on the Mac you should make sure youre getting the features you expect.

App For Spreadsheets Vanilla Software Market And

The Competition Numbers (20) is Apples entry into the spreadsheet software market and its not bad.

Number has always favored its stylish graphs over its feature set, but that doesnt make it useless.

Advertisement Mesa (34) and Tables (42) are both simple spreadsheet apps that, while very good, are hard to justify because of the cost.

These two apps are very focused on offering a basic feature set and remaining focused, rather than becoming bloated software.

The result is two very serviceable spreadsheet apps, but you have to wonder why youre paying so much for something thats not quite as capable as some cheaper apps.

App For Spreadsheets Vanilla Free Option For

Calc (Free) is the spreadsheet app that comes along with LibreOffice and is your best free option for spreadsheet work.

It handles everything youd except, from equations to graphs and more, plus its capable of handling the Excel document format.

Advertisement Have a favorite spreadsheet app we didnt mention Share it in the comments.

Lifehackers App Directory is a new and growing directory of recommendations for the best applications and tools in a number of given categories.

Mac App For Spreadsheets Vanilla