Alternative to MS Excel?

Part 1 (2017)
1

Hi everyone,
In github/fast.ai, there are excels used by Jeremy, I tried to use google spreadsheet to open/edit them, but due to some compatibility, fail.
In the lesson2, 3, videos, and maybe in all of the videos, Jeremy would use a lot of excel to illustrate his idea. But I could not open/edit them, since online google spreadsheet is not so compatible with them.
How do you solve this issue ? To buy a Microsoft excel ? This cost $109.99, very expansive…

2

You can download a free trial version of MS Office from the official website.

3

@dsengupta16 only 30 days free trial…

4

@huangyingw I believe 30 days is more than enough for the course’s use of excel.
Otherwise you can uninstall and install it again.

5

@dsengupta16 haha, I just find a wonderful alternative: libreoffice.

1 Like
6

I thought LibreOffice is for Linux only.

7

Do any of the open source alternatives support the full range of formulae that Jeremy uses? Apple Numbers doesn’t have matrix multiplication

8

none of them.
I have tried OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Apple Number, Google Spreadsheet.
The closest ones are LibreOffice and google spreadsheet.
BTW, I am on Mac.

9

Have you tried Microsoft Excel online it is free, I have uploaded the fast.ai excel files and it seems to work.

10

Google Sheets seems to work well for the simpler simulations.

11

@aymenim, thanks, that’s very cool.

12

I have not verified, but Jeremy may use OLE objects, which are reproduced in other implementations . If so you either must use Excel,substitute his macros for some other more portable implementation

13

I am using speech to text and the above is very scrambled. What I was trying to state was… Jeremy uses macro parts that are proprietary to MS . for ease, just use Excel

14

Later update by Jeremy: Google Sheets versions of spreadsheets

15

Gnumeric is pretty cool, but I am not sure if there is a Windows version.