These free web tools can make life easier for users of Excel, Google Sheets, or any spreadsheet program.
Those who regularly work with spreadsheet apps know the power they hold, and their limitations. These free web tools can make life easier for users of Excel, Google Sheets, or any spreadsheet program.
Microsoft Excel remains the king of spreadsheet apps, while Google Sheets is the clear winner for free users. But whether you use either of these or one of the fantastic Excel alternatives for spreadsheets, these apps could do with a bit of help. Whether it's sharing your files online safely and securely or opening a CSV with millions of rows of data, a few free web apps make spreadsheets better than before.
You can email an Excel, share it on the cloud, or have a shared editable file on Google Sheets. But all these require the other person to have one of those accounts. Plus, there are security risks in publicly sharing a spreadsheet from your Google Sheets. It's a good idea to periodically check who has access to your Google Drive files.
Quick XLS offers a simple, secure, no-login way to share spreadsheets online as a simple link. Go to the site, add a title for your file, and copy-paste the contents from any spreadsheet you have. Then, click submit to get a unique link with your rows and columns, which you can embed in any website or share as a link with others. They're free to copy them or edit them as needed.
Unfortunately, Quick XLS doesn't support multiple sheets for the same file. It's a miss, but given the security and convenience you get in return, it's a worthy sacrifice. It's a great alternative to sharing a publicly viewable and editable Google sheet.
We often use spreadsheets to create timelines to track long-term projects and goals. However, creating these timelines in sheets is a tedious process of a lot of copy-pasting, adding dates, etc. Spreadsheet Timeline makes it much easier by generating a custom timeline which you can download as an XLS or copy-paste to a spreadsheet app of your choice.
The app lets you add the start date of your timeline and choose a date format (mm/dd/yyyy or yyyy/mm/dd). Your timeline can appear grouped as days and weeks or as weeks and quarters. If you're a developer using it for sprints, Spreadsheet Timeline will add ten sprints automatically, but you can switch this off.
In the end, you get a simple sheet with rows for week commencing, date, day, important dates, holidays/vacations, and start and end. Each day is a separate column to fill in the sheet when you get it.
A spreadsheet is useful for so many things: complex mathematical calculations, making ordered lists and changing the order, creating charts, sorting data, etc. We do these things often, but if opening a new spreadsheet file for that seems too much trouble, Quick Spreadsheet is the answer.
This app lives in the Chrome extension bar. Click it for a dropdown pane with a temporary spreadsheet in it. It's impressively fast and full-featured. With a regular Formula bar, all the functions you're used to in Sheets, with text and cell formatting options, it's pretty much a standard spreadsheet app. You can even create multiple sheets within it.
Of course, it's all temporary as you can't save this information to a file. But that's as simple as copy-pasting. The focus of Quick Spreadsheet is on speed, and it does that perfectly.
Download: Quick Spreadsheet for Chrome (Free)
Sheetlist is a collection of free spreadsheet templates to download readymade Microsoft Excel and Google Sheet files. The sheets are sorted into categories like Invoices, COVID-19, Random & Fun, Content Marketing, Weddings, Social Media, Productivity, Growth, Project Management, Investments & Stocks, Taxes, Budgeting & Finance, SEO, Email Marketing, and App Store Optimization.
Each category has multiple sheets, like the finance category having different types of budgeting spreadsheets. You'll see a screenshot of what it looks like and a small description of what it achieves. You can also submit your own sheets to Sheetlist.
Most of the hosted files are Google Sheets, which you can't download or edit. But when you open the file, click "Make a Copy" to add it to your own Google Sheets. You can then download it, edit it, or copy-paste the cells.
Spreadsheets are fantastic for storing a tremendous amount of data, especially in the CSV format. For example, you can have a profile of hundreds of thousands of users or data sets with millions of rows. But have you ever tried opening one such file in Excel or Google Sheets? The app will freeze, and chances are, your computer will give up under the load of handling such a large file.
CSV Explorer is a tool dedicated to handling spreadsheets with a large dataset. The free version of the web app supports up to 5 million rows and can go up to 20 million rows with the premium package.
The opened file can be used to search, filter, and analyze your data, just like any powerful spreadsheet app. It'll save your dataset for up to 2 weeks, but be warned—you can't save or export it. For that, you'll need the paid Pro account.
As you use different types of apps to make better spreadsheets, you'll naturally conclude that Excel is the best of them all. It's mainly about using the other apps to augment Excel rather than the other way around.
And within Microsoft Excel itself, there's always more to learn. For example, just learning the basic LOOKUP functions will entirely revolutionize how you use spreadsheets in Excel. Universities offer free courses on leveling up your Excel game, from essential business skills to data analysis. Take advantage of everything the internet offers for free to improve how you use spreadsheets.
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Mihir Patkar has been writing on technology and productivity for over 14 years at some of the top media publications across the world. He has an academic background in journalism.
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