Spreadsheet

Number crunching made easy.

The spreadsheet applications on the different office suites offer nearly the same functionality. At the minimum, they each provide a number of functions to create formulas and perform complex calculations. Besides performing basic mathematical functions, all the spreadsheet applications boast of built-in functions for common financial and statistical operations. One of the best features of these modern replacements for pen and paper worksheets is what’s known as what-if analysis, where you change one field of data and see the tools automatically change the values of associated fields.

LibreOffice Calc and WPS Spreadsheets hold the distinction of being among the easiest to use. In addition, Calc boasts of many wizards to help you use its advanced functions. You can easily pull data off databases, and collaborate with other users, which makes it ideal for most office setups.

Google Spreadsheets isn’t that far behind, and as with all the other Google Docs applications, it too provides many different templates to choose from. The documentation is on point, and precise in the help it offers.

All the programs support a variety of formats and enable you to export the data as either a PDF or CSV file, and with the exception of Calc and Sheets all default to the xlsx format. The applications also look fairly alike, with Calligra Sheets being the only exception. Once again, the reliance on dockers to provide different functionality makes working with Calligra an unintuitive experience, despite the fact that it provides the same functionality as other applications, such as LibreOffice Calc.

WPS Spreadsheets offers a more populated interface than OnlyOffice, but Calligra’s is the most difficult to work with, out of the products on test.