A free Excel alternative with no account, that opens and saves .xlsx

Sheets is a spreadsheet that runs in the browser tab, free, with no account and nothing to install. It opens an Excel .xlsx with its sheets, formulas, formats, charts and pivot tables, and saves one that opens in Excel, Numbers and LibreOffice. It has 167 functions, not Excel’s whole library, and no macros, Power Query or dynamic arrays; if a workbook depends on those, keep it in Excel.

What Excel costs, and what the free one asks

Microsoft sells Excel on the desktop as part of Microsoft 365. Microsoft’s US store lists Microsoft 365 Personal at $99.99 a year, as read on 28 September 2026.

Excel for the web is free, and good. To use it you sign in with a Microsoft account, and the workbook is saved in and shared from OneDrive, which comes with 5 GB of free storage. It cannot create, run or edit VBA macros; a workbook that has them opens, and the macros are kept for the desktop program.

If an account and a copy in OneDrive are fine for your figures, Excel for the web is an excellent free spreadsheet. The reason to use Sheets instead is the case where they are not: a budget, a payroll sheet, a list of customers or a client’s accounts that you would rather did not sit on anybody’s server.

What Sheets does

• Formulas that recalculate as you type, across several sheets and defined names, with 167 functions: XLOOKUP, VLOOKUP, INDEX and MATCH, SUMIFS and COUNTIFS, IFS and SWITCH, TEXTJOIN, TEXT with its format codes, NETWORKDAYS, and PMT, NPV, IRR and the other financial ones.
• Charts, sparklines and pivot tables. A chart goes into an .xlsx as Excel’s own chart, not a picture, and a pivot table as Excel’s own pivot table, which Excel refreshes when it opens the file.
• The formatting a workbook carries: fonts, fills, borders, number formats, merged cells, column widths, frozen panes, colour rules, data validation, notes, the filter, and the print area and page setup.
• Sort, find and replace, and tables.
• CSV in and out, for the exports banks, shops and accounting programs produce.
• Kept on your computer. The workbook autosaves to the browser’s storage for this site, on this device, and is written to a real .xlsx file when you export it. It keeps working with the network switched off once it has been opened.

What comes across in an .xlsx

What Excel still does better

• Macros. Sheets runs no VBA, and no scripts of any kind. A workbook that is really a program belongs in Excel.
• Power Query and the data model. Sheets has no way to pull in and reshape data from other sources, and no Power Pivot.
• Dynamic arrays. FILTER, UNIQUE, SORT, SORTBY and SEQUENCE, which spill a list of results into the cells below, are not here, nor LET, LAMBDA or array constants such as {1,2,3}.
• The rest of the function library. 167 functions covers most everyday workbooks, not every one. The list says what is there and what is missing.
• Several people in one workbook at once. Sheets has no server, so there is nothing for two people to share live; a workbook moves between people as a file.
• Very large workbooks. A browser tab has less memory to work with than a desktop program, so a very large workbook is better in Excel.

What it costs

Nothing. Sheets is part of the Workspace, with Docs, Slides, the PDF editor and the rest, and the whole Workspace is free for everyone, at work included, with no account. Nothing in it asks for a plan.

Try it on a real file. Open Sheets and drop an .xlsx on it, or start a blank workbook.