Office Web Apps are a great solution for business professionals and individuals who work with Office documents and often need to share them with other people – colleagues, bosses, professors or clients.
MS Excel Web App is a very popular Office Web Apps feature that lets users create, share, edit and collaborate on spreadsheets online. This option allows collaboration in real time where users can see who is working on the same spreadsheet and what they are inputting at the moment.
The major benefit of this web-based app is that it saves users’ time and simplifies the process of sharing. Instead of sending an attached document vie email to a third party and waiting to receive a corrected version, people can instantly share documents online and work on them simultaneously.
However, not everyone uses Microsoft Suite and Office Web Apps. Fortunately, Internet offers a variety of excellent alternatives to Excel Web Apps and today we’ll cover eight of them that come highly recommended by tech experts. Very importantly, all of these apps are free.
1) Google Spreadsheets
Google Spreadsheets is probably the most popular and frequently used service for creating and sharing spreadsheets online. In order to use it, you need to create a free Google account (if you don’t already have it) which will only take a few minutes of your time, after which you are ready to start creating, sharing and collaborating on spreadsheets, charts, graphs, pivot table reports, forms and much more.
2) ThinkFree
ThinkFree is similar to Google Drive in that it also enables you to create and share different types of documents free of charge.
Its three main types of programs are Write, Calc and Show which are compatible with many similar office programs. Tending to the growing population of smartphone users, ThinkFree also created a very useful ThinkFree Mobile service. People who are often traveling and cell phones are their only way to follow up on their work can also look up these other useful alternative spreadsheet apps for Android.
3) EditGrid
EditGrid has a rich set of options that are appealing to more demanding users. It has a large collection of already created spreadsheets that people can go to for ideas, it connects you with live data sources, allows you to embed charts to a blog or website and has many advanced spreadsheet editing features.
4) Spreadsheet LIVE
Spreadsheet Live is another reliable web-based spreadsheet app that lets users create spreadsheets from scratch and collaborate on them with other users in real time. It can be accessed from any computer and any browser.
5) Sheetster
Sheetster is an open source web spreadsheet app that allows you to store your documents in any database or file system. One of its attractive features is that it is ad free.
6) ZCubes Calci
ZCubes Calci is a very advanced calculation engine that offers several less frequent spreadsheet options, like 3D graphs, integration with drawing and painting tools, integration with presentation slides, drawing over the spreadsheet function, etc.
7) Simple Spreadsheet
Simple Spreadsheet is another spreadsheet application similar to Excel Web App. It is written in Javascript, PHP, CSS and HTML and uses Javascript for its data format.
8) Num Sum
Num Sum doesn’t offer as many options as Google Drive or EditGrid, but it is appealing to users who are looking for simple and quick document sharing. You need to sign up if you want to edit and share your work. However, registration is not necessary if you only want to look at other people’s charts and lists, provided they allow public viewing. Num Sum also offers a nice “tag” feature that helps you better organize your documents.