“Excel may be the dominant spreadsheet-editing software, but there are plenty of alternatives that can fulfill your data analysis and number-crunching needs. Whether you’re paranoid about storing your precious files on Microsoft’s servers or want a neat app that doesn’t force you to pay subscription fees, you’ll find plenty of decent Excel alternatives. Grist is one such option that you can self-host on your local hardware, and here’s a byte-sized guide to help you integrate this neat utility into your workflows.”
Grist is definitely NOT an Excel clone. It does things quite differently. My biggest pain was to ditch the “=sum(formula)” type approach. It’s easy once you realise you must use the + to add a new column and choose formula.
Another key difference is the way that you set a format for currency. Excel (or LibreOffice) would be a right-click and select currency. With Grist you pick a type as numeric, then click on spinner, and then select the $ symbol.
Because it is powered on the backend by a database, a column is essentially a field name and type, whilst the rows would be records. One advantage of this is that by changing a column to be say hyperlinks, the whole columns records instantly become hyperlinks.
The reasons why it is different, is partly because although it is a spreadsheet UI, it can have relational database tables working from the spreadsheet view, and it also supports Python syntax. It has various widgets, or you can also build your own for various custom views.
There is a paid enterprise service, but the core version is fully open source. Docker is also not the only way to install and run this app.
Yes, there is LibreOffice, FreeOffice, etc but if you want a modern looking and solid cloud based spreadsheet service, this looks pretty interesting.
Actually, it is pretty good to see a “spreadsheet” that looks and works differently!