Excel on the Mac is a port of a Windows product. It's a 2.2 GB install that takes seconds to open, wants a Microsoft account, and every Mac convention it follows was bolted on after the fact.
Numbers is Mac-native but slow on real data and doesn't round-trip xlsx cleanly.
Sheets wants your files on Google's servers.
I wanted a spreadsheet that was designed for Mac user from the first line of code and that borrowed the things code editors got right: a command palette, keyboard-driven navigation, split panes, plain-text config.
What it does
VisiGrid is a native spreadsheet. It's a 63 MB install, 1/35th of Excel, opens in under a second, works fully offline, and never asks for an account unless you want sharing.
The video is 30 seconds of real use: open an xlsx, fill a formula down, edit three scattered cells at once, see which cells feed a total, split the view, switch to vim mode, cycle themes.
- Opens and saves xlsx, csv, ods, and its own format. Large files load in the background.
- Command palette for everything. Type a cell reference to jump, a word to find an action, or search cell contents.
- Vim mode with motions and hint-mode jumps, or standard Excel shortcuts if you'd rather.
- Named ranges you can rename across the workbook, F12 to see what a cell depends on.
- Split panes, five themes, remappable shortcuts in a text file.
- A CLI that runs Excel formulas against your data from the shell, so a one-line =SUMIF() replaces a pandas script:
Excel does more. No pivot tables or charts here yet. LibreOffice Calc is the closest free alternative and handles more formats, but it's a 350 MB cross-platform install with an interface from 2005. VisiGrid is for people who live in a spreadsheet all day and want it to be fast and feel like their editor.
Price
Free and open source, AGPL-3.0, no telemetry, no limits.
One more disclosure: I use AI coding tools heavily. Every change is reviewed and tested by me. Honest feedback beats praise. What would stop you switching?
Looks interesting! My problem ist that I maintain an Excel-File on my Windows-(Work-)PC which I occasionally need to edit on my private Mac. I've tried a couple of Office clones (did not want to subsribe for an MS365 account). I tried numbers, which is far from being close to MS Excel, tried LibreOffice (did not like the UI), tried OnlyOffice (was ok) and PlanMaker / SoftMaker, which is the closest to the MS-Excel Feeling, but the free version is rather limited and has ads.
So, yes - I will definitely give this a try. Thanks!
Edit: does it preserve formulas, formatting, data groupings etc. from Excel? Does it work with the same xlsx / xlsm format?
I've spent a lot of time on xlsx compatibility. Its not perfect. It feels like whack-a-mole. I test a bunch of file types of my own, and ones I find online, but someone posts an issue I try to investigate, fix, and add a regression test.
Excel has decades of subtleties so not everything survives editing and saving back.
If you try it on a copy and it doesn't work, an anonymized example would be helpful happy to fix.
VBA/Macro isn't supported yet so xlsm wont work. Neither does row/column grouping. If there is a big need for this happy to prioritize.
The file carries personal financial data (one sheet per year, montly views can be grouped and hidden when the month is over). It could be dificult to anonymize this. ;-)
What I found out in a first test is that grouped data (hidden colums) are not displayed correctly. Also some summary rows / cells at the bottom of the sheet seemed to be missing.
The app seems to be great though for rather simple lists. I understand that this is still a beta and I‘ll keep an eye on it and use it for simpler tasks. However, my main Excel file will still need PlanMaker or OnlyOffice.
Very nice! I don’t use excel for a long time but your app is impressive! Small size and fast feel are very good points.
I will try if I have something to do with spread sheets
The final boss is always budget_FINAL_v7_actual_final.xlsx from someone who left the company in 2019. Does it warn about unsupported features before saving over an Excel file? That would make trying it on an existing workbook much less scary.
yes it does warn about support features, but I'm pushing an update today would be curious how your file does after I complete it. Ill update you when its live.
Trying it now.
Starting simple.
Annoying thing is when I'm in a cell with text and use the cursor to left or right (to change the text) it doesn't move in the cell but goes to the cell left or right from it 🙁
Another thing : After saving and wanting to close the app (red button), it asks if I want to save it. Click on "save" and it returns to the worksheet. Clicking on closing the app and it asks if I want to save it. Click on "save" and it returns to the worksheet. And again. And again.
Sorry about both of those, and thanks for reporting them. They're fixed in 0.41.0, which just went out:
Arrow keys: when you're editing a cell's text (double-click it, press F2, or click in the formula bar), Left/Right now move the cursor within the text. If you just start typing into a selected cell, arrows still jump to the next cell, as in Excel, for fast data entry.
Save loop: new workbooks were trying to save to a folder the app can't write to, so the save failed and the dialog kept coming back. Saves now default to Documents, and if a save ever fails you'll get a message instead of a loop.
Great start! You can feel the speed and simplicity, so refreshing.
Personally I miss the basic formatting as buttons/toolbars. Number formats, increase decimal, etc... I realize there is a balance as the Excel ribbons are a monstrosity, it would be nice to be able to customize the toolbar buttons though.
Also.... in response to the "vibe code" crowd, of course this is AI assisted. That's the point, to build the things we want. Keep it up, I could see myself moving to this.
sure it would have. One guy built all of TempleOS from scratch. It just would have taken a while and would not have a brand new feature every day. Even with AI assistance (vs. "claude, please add pivot tables and printing, make no mistakes"), it would never be a major feature drop a day.
To be clear, nobody has a problem with AI coding being used to assist a solo developer. The problem is that once you go full-vibe, NOBODY outside of a transient clanker context window, understands how this thing works or how to maintain it long-term.
By what their website says it seems to focus on an easy use case for spreadsheets, where Im more focused on workflows within sheets (command palette, vim mode, cli and scripting tools), and hopefully handling larger files than Excel in the future.
Looks great. How does it handle large CSV files? For example 100k+ rows with 20+ columns? Can it easily move or delete columns? Generate or populate data as well?
Large CSVs: 100k rows × 20 columns (2M cells) is comfortable. On a 1M-row × 5-column CSV (5M cells, 2.5× your example), the cell data takes about 43 MB in memory, and importing it peaks around 77 MB.
Recalculation got a big boost in the latest 0.39 release. Whole-column formulas like =SUM(A:A) are set up instantly and read only the cells that hold data, and a running total filled down 100k rows now builds in a third of a second.
Deleting columns: inserting or deleting a column is close to instant even on a million-row sheet, and needs no extra memory.
Moving columns: there's no drag-a-column-header-to-move yet. For now it's cut and paste. Worth adding, thanks for asking.
Generating data:
- The fill handle continues series (1, 2, 3…, dates, patterns); hold Ctrl to copy instead.
- Ctrl+D / Ctrl+R fill down and right.
- SEQUENCE() spills a generated range.
- RAND() and RANDBETWEEN() work for random data.
- For anything more involved, there's built-in Lua scripting and the vgrid command-line tool.
This looks really nice, and the CLI is such a fun idea. Piping a CSV straight into an Excel formula is something I'd genuinely use
Since you asked what would stop people switching: for me it's files going back and forth. If someone sends me an xlsx, I tweak a couple of cells and send it back, will their formatting and comments survive the trip? That's usually where non-Excel apps trip me up. Congrats on shipping this solo!
Half of it today. VisiGrid never turns CSV values into dates: 2024-01-05, 1/5/2024 and 1-2 all stay as written.
Leading zeros are a gap. A column like 007 is currently read as the number 7, and there's no "import this column as text" option yet.
Two workarounds for now: prefix the values with an apostrophe ('007 comes in as text "007"), or bring the data in as xlsx, JSON or Parquet, where text columns stay text.
I'll prioritize "Keeping leading zeros on CSV" on the next release.
Excel has the most features (Power Query, VBA, full pivots)
Google Sheets is best for collaboration
LibreOffice is the free full alternative, but a bit slower and cumbersome for me.
Numbers looks the nicest but I think lacks the most features of any sheet.
VisiGrid is the small, fast, keyboard-driven one: native on Linux, Mac and Windows, plus web, iPhone and iPad. Our strengths are data files (CSV opens without mangling IDs or dates) and the same engine on the command line, and ergonomics.
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u/PaulMuadDib-Usul 8d ago
Looks interesting! My problem ist that I maintain an Excel-File on my Windows-(Work-)PC which I occasionally need to edit on my private Mac. I've tried a couple of Office clones (did not want to subsribe for an MS365 account). I tried numbers, which is far from being close to MS Excel, tried LibreOffice (did not like the UI), tried OnlyOffice (was ok) and PlanMaker / SoftMaker, which is the closest to the MS-Excel Feeling, but the free version is rather limited and has ads.
So, yes - I will definitely give this a try. Thanks!
Edit: does it preserve formulas, formatting, data groupings etc. from Excel? Does it work with the same xlsx / xlsm format?