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Comment by howlingfantods | Hacker News Reader

It's a joy to see so many newer, lighter weight but fully featured OSX apps replace the bloated Adobe software suite (eg. sketch, affinity photo, etc.)

Now will someone please, please make a fully featured spreadsheet alternative to Excel on Mac? All I want is to be able to use the alt key ribbon shortcuts...

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I work with a number of M&A analysts who all use Excel on Mac (heresy!) for financial modeling every day. With a combination of BetterTouchTools to access deep menu items and script sequences of key commands, as well as an intuitive knowledge of the builtin keyboard shortcuts, they see no reason to go back to Windows. Also, Excel has Applescript AND VB/XLM macros nowadays, and if you bind those to BetterTouchTools, you can do absolutely anything you want. If you haven't tried the Office 365 version, it's worth taking another look.

Isn't that what Numbers is? And it's terrible if you know Excel. Plus Office is only like $10 a month now.

Edit: Meant Numbers, said Sheets.

Sheets is definitely usable but it's a bit light on functionality. I'm using the new Excel for Mac right now and it's just very slow and buggy. Also, the aforementioned alt-key shortcut is absent in the Mac version. Not having these shortcuts literally adds hours to my workday.

I'd probably pay 300-400 dollars for an Excel alternative with full keyboard shortcuts.

And you've tried Mac Numbers (http://www.apple.com/mac/numbers/) right?

I tried it many years ago and it was lacking features like pivot tables and scripting. Overall, I got the impression that numbers was more consumer than professional oriented. Haven't used it recently though.

>and it's just very slow and buggy.

I've been using it for months with large-ish sheets (e.g. 10-20MB) but have neither seen it to be slow nor buggy.

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