How to make changes to an excel spredsheet without office installed. (1 Viewer)

Aug 27, 2009
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What is the best way to access and change an excel spreadsheet on a computer that doesn't have office installed. Android and Windows.......Thanks(y)
 
Oct 1, 2013
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I use WPS office. Or Google Sheets

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tonka

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Open office (y)

Free. been around for years. Excel import no problem.

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Gellyneck

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WPS on both Windows and Linux. There's a Mac version as well.

Open Office is liable to be "retired" soon as there's been no updates for nigh on a year due to lack of donations \ investment. Libre Office is a "forked" alternative of Open Office and may be a suitable replacement for those using the latter.

Thanks Yorick.....is it possible to bring a spreadsheet in from office excel on another pc into google sheets to work with. If so how..:)
Don't use Google Sheets but could you e-mail Excel file as an attachment to a GMail account and open in Google Sheets from there? There could be a simpler way that Yorick might know of though!!
 
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Aug 27, 2009
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WPS on both Windows and Linux. There's a Mac version as well.

Open Office is liable to be "retired" soon as there's been no updates for nigh on a year due to lack of donations \ investment. Libre Office is a "forked" alternative of Open Office and may be a suitable replacement for those using the latter.


Don't use Google Sheets but could you e-mail Excel file as an attachment to a GMail account and open in Google Sheets from there? There could be a simpler way that Yorick might know of though!!
Thanks Gellyneck, I had almost given up with G/sheets but will give this a try. I did however manage to get my excel spreadsheets to work with open office seems to work well now you tell me it could be gone soon...;) Thanks again I am getting there slowly....(y)
 
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Open Office is liable to be "retired" soon as there's been no updates for nigh on a year due to lack of donations \ investment. Libre Office is a "forked" alternative of Open Office and may be a suitable replacement for those using the latter.

Open Office won't be retired. There was gossip doing the rounds about this and it hit the tech sites but there is no truth behind it. It was caused by a discussion thread on the Apache NewsGroup.

That being said. I moved to LibreOffice shortly after it launched as I don't like Oracle and they invariably kill any Open Source software they get their grubby mitts on.

LibreOffice is excellent and I use it every day.

For those of you who don't understand the OpenSource thing...

== Simplified ==
When a program is written the programmer types the code into an editor. This is then compiled into a binary. office.exe for example. In the case of Microsoft they then sell copies of this binary. If you find a bug in the software you have to report it to Microsoft and hope they fix it quickly, release an update which you can download. You do not have access to the source code, you can't make changes to the program and you can't distribute the fix/update.

With Open Source software, the programmer will not only give you a binary, he will give you his work (source code) as well. Quite often these day this is pushed to a source code repository like GitHub ( https://github.com/about ). Other people will then download the source code, make additions, fixes and update and upload these changes. As a project becomes more an more popular, more programmers help out and make for a massive core of programmers. If you as a normal use finds a bug, you can contact the project directly and report it. This will be seen by all the developers in the project and the chances are good that one of them will pick it up and fix it pretty quickly. In the past I have reported bugs and had a new binary with the bug fix within 4 hours. This obviously doesn't happen all the time but more often than you would expect.

The software license used are many and varied. There are Apache, MIT and GPL licenses which are the most popular. some licenses allow you to do whatever you want with the code others such as the GPL 2 Say that you can use the code however you want. If however you make any changes or improvements you must give these back to the original code repository and if you release a commercial product based on it you have to provide ALL the source code as well. This leads to projects developing very quickly.

The other advantage of OpenSource is that if a project gets into trouble, it can be forked. This is where a rival programmer or team of programmers can take the entire code base and start a new project based on this code.

This is what happened with Open Office. Open Office was owned by Sun MicroSystems who were pretty good for community based development. However they hit financial problems and were bought out by Oracle. Oracle are notorious for killing Open Source projects. so a big chunk of the Open Office team forked the project and Created Libre Office. The first release was identical to the final release of OpenOffice prior to the fork. These developers then got on with the task of cleaning up the project, optimising it and adding new features at much faster rate than was possible under Oracles control. This attracted new developers and now Libre Office is the primary office software suite chosen by most people.

Oracle then passed control of Open Office over to the Apache Foundation which is the home of many Open Source projects.

@buttons sorry for going off topic.. But my recommendation would be to install just the spreadsheet component of LibreOffice. It is small and fast.

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OP
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Aug 27, 2009
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Open Office won't be retired. There was gossip doing the rounds about this and it hit the tech sites but there is no truth behind it. It was caused by a discussion thread on the Apache NewsGroup.

That being said. I moved to LibreOffice shortly after it launched as I don't like Oracle and they invariably kill any Open Source software they get their grubby mitts on.

LibreOffice is excellent and I use it every day.

For those of you who don't understand the OpenSource thing...

== Simplified ==
When a program is written the programmer types the code into an editor. This is then compiled into a binary. office.exe for example. In the case of Microsoft they then sell copies of this binary. If you find a bug in the software you have to report it to Microsoft and hope they fix it quickly, release an update which you can download. You do not have access to the source code, you can't make changes to the program and you can't distribute the fix/update.

With Open Source software, the programmer will not only give you a binary, he will give you his work (source code) as well. Quite often these day this is pushed to a source code repository like GitHub ( https://github.com/about ). Other people will then download the source code, make additions, fixes and update and upload these changes. As a project becomes more an more popular, more programmers help out and make for a massive core of programmers. If you as a normal use finds a bug, you can contact the project directly and report it. This will be seen by all the developers in the project and the chances are good that one of them will pick it up and fix it pretty quickly. In the past I have reported bugs and had a new binary with the bug fix within 4 hours. This obviously doesn't happen all the time but more often than you would expect.

The software license used are many and varied. There are Apache, MIT and GPL licenses which are the most popular. some licenses allow you to do whatever you want with the code others such as the GPL 2 Say that you can use the code however you want. If however you make any changes or improvements you must give these back to the original code repository and if you release a commercial product based on it you have to provide ALL the source code as well. This leads to projects developing very quickly.

The other advantage of OpenSource is that if a project gets into trouble, it can be forked. This is where a rival programmer or team of programmers can take the entire code base and start a new project based on this code.

This is what happened with Open Office. Open Office was owned by Sun MicroSystems who were pretty good for community based development. However they hit financial problems and were bought out by Oracle. Oracle are notorious for killing Open Source projects. so a big chunk of the Open Office team forked the project and Created Libre Office. The first release was identical to the final release of OpenOffice prior to the fork. These developers then got on with the task of cleaning up the project, optimising it and adding new features at much faster rate than was possible under Oracles control. This attracted new developers and now Libre Office is the primary office software suite chosen by most people.

Oracle then passed control of Open Office over to the Apache Foundation which is the home of many Open Source projects.

@buttons sorry for going off topic.. But my recommendation would be to install just the spreadsheet component of LibreOffice. It is small and fast.
Thanks Gromett that made interesting reading. I did download the full package which seems pretty fast but I will have a look later. Will Open Office work as well using Android and the like.?
 
Feb 27, 2011
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Thanks Gromett that made interesting reading. I did download the full package which seems pretty fast but I will have a look later. Will Open Office work as well using Android and the like.?
LibreOffice doesn't work on Android as far as I know. It does have a view but I don't think an editor just yet.

https://www.libreoffice.org/download/android-viewer/

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Feb 27, 2011
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PS: It is a Beta app so don't expect miracles.
 

mjltigger

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Google sheets gets my vote as well. Open the file path from chrome. You may need to install drive first

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Apr 27, 2016
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I use Libre Office. More than once it's been able to open and edit Excel spreadsheets from old MS Office versions, when the new MS Office version won't open it.
 

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