A free Excel alternative for Mac that still opens your xlsx files
Microsoft Excel for Mac is excellent, but it is not free. To edit spreadsheets in the desktop app you need a Microsoft 365 subscription (Personal is $99.99 a year in the US, Family $129.99) or a one-time Office Home 2024 license ($179.99 on Microsoft's store when we checked in November 2026). If you only open a budget, an invoice or a report someone emailed you a few times a month, that is a lot to pay.
Foglio is a free Excel alternative for Mac: an open-source spreadsheet app that reads and writes the same .xlsx files, understands about 500 Excel functions and uses Excel for Mac's keyboard shortcuts. This page explains what you keep, what you lose, and when Excel is still the right choice.
Updated
What you keep when you switch
Foglio was designed to feel familiar to anyone who has used Excel. The grid, the formula bar with the Name Box, sheet tabs, the status bar sums and the menus are where you expect them. Most shortcuts are the same: ⌘1 for Format Cells, ⌘D to fill down, F4 to cycle $ references, ⇧⌘T for AutoSum, ⌘K for a hyperlink.
- Your files.
.xlsxopens and saves with fonts, fills, borders, number formats, merged cells, column widths, frozen panes, comments, data validation, conditional formatting, hyperlinks, charts and pictures. - Your formulas. About 500 functions, including SUMIFS, XLOOKUP, INDEX/MATCH, FILTER, SORT, UNIQUE, LET and LAMBDA. In Foglio's compatibility audit, 191 of 195 commonly used functions match Excel on every test case.
- Your language. On an Italian, German, Spanish or French Mac you type formulas with the localized names Excel uses (
=SOMMA(A1:A10),=SVERWEIS(…)), with;separators and decimal commas. The file stores the standard English form, so it opens in any Excel. - Your habits. Fill handle, Paste Special, AutoFilter, multi-level sort, Find & Replace, Go To, Remove Duplicates, Text to Columns, freeze panes, Show Formulas and the Insert Function browser are all there.
What you gain
It costs nothing, permanently. No subscription, no trial, no account, no ads. Foglio is licensed under MIT and Apache-2.0, and the source code is on GitHub.
It is tiny and fast. The download is 7.5 MB and the installed app is about 19 MB, against more than a gigabyte for Excel alone. Foglio opens to a usable window in 0.24 s and uses about 58 MB of memory with an empty sheet. A 100,000-row workbook with 300,000 formulas opens in 1.1 s, and after an edit it recalculates in 16 ms.
It stays on your Mac. Foglio makes no network connections of its own and has no telemetry. You do not sign in to anything to open a file.
What you lose
Foglio 1.0 is a first release by a small project, and it does not try to be all of Excel. Before you cancel a subscription, check that your work does not depend on any of these:
- Macros and VBA.
.xlsmfiles open, but macros are not run and are not kept when you save. - Pivot tables. There are no real pivot tables yet. Summarize by builds a live summary sheet from SUMIFS and COUNTIFS formulas, which covers simple cases.
- Power Query, data connections and add-ins. Not available.
- Shapes, text boxes and SmartArt. Skipped when a file is opened. Charts and pictures are kept.
- Data bars, icon sets and sparklines. Not drawn yet; other conditional formatting rules and color scales work.
- Password-protected workbooks. Cannot be opened.
- Threaded comments are shown as plain notes, and there is no real-time co-authoring.
- Charts cover the common types (column, bar, line, pie, doughnut, area, scatter, stacked), not Excel's full range.
Other ways to use Excel files on a Mac for free
Foglio is not the only option, and depending on your needs another one may suit you better:
- Excel for the web is free with a Microsoft account and is the real Excel, in a browser. Your files live in OneDrive, and some desktop features are missing.
- Apple Numbers is free and pre-installed on many Macs. It converts
.xlsxfiles to its own format and exports back to Excel when you ask. - LibreOffice Calc is free, open source and very complete, including pivot tables and macros, but it is a large download and does not look or behave like a native Mac app.
- Google Sheets is free with a Google account and the best choice when several people edit at once.
How they compare
The full comparison table puts all five side by side, with sources for every price and size, and the roundup of free spreadsheet apps adds a few more. There are also dedicated pages for Numbers, LibreOffice and Google Sheets.
When you should keep Excel
Keep paying for Excel if your work runs on macros, Power Query or pivot tables, if you exchange complex models with colleagues who need everything to survive the round trip exactly, if your company requires Microsoft 365, or if you want Copilot. Excel also has iPhone, iPad and Windows versions; Foglio is Mac-only.
Many people end up using both: Foglio for quick, everyday files because it opens instantly, Excel for the few heavy workbooks that need it.
How to try a free Excel alternative with your own files
Download Foglio (7.5 MB, macOS 14 or later), drag it to Applications and open it. Because Foglio 1.0 is not notarized by Apple, macOS asks for confirmation the first time; the download page shows how. Then open a copy of a real workbook with File ▸ Open, or right-click an .xlsx file and choose Open With ▸ Foglio.
Check the things that matter to you: totals, lookups, dates, number formats, charts. Keep the original until you are confident. If something looks wrong, please report it on GitHub with a sample file.