There is Apples product - http://www.apple.com/iwork/ , there is OpenOffice which is FreeSoftware and great - http://download.openoffice.org/other... and there is my favorite python + textfiles (seriously!) - Anders Norgaard

open office calc - Chris Miller

iWork's Numbers has some serious limitations: no keyboard shortcuts to jump to the end of a row or column (I'm not going to scroll through 10k rows!), can't insert copied rows, etc. I haven't tried OpenOffice yet. - Walter Jessen

+1 for OpenOffice - Pierre Lindenbaum

I will be the dissonant voice and disagree with the Open Office suggestion. I'd rather learn Numbers shortcuts than use OO. http://www.apple.com/support... - pn

sorry geek response: mysql | grep | sort | uniq | awk . The world would be better without spreadhsheets - Pierre Lindenbaum

Excel is the standard for spreadsheet applications -- doesn't make it a great application, but I have looked for a decent Linux replacement and have been hard pressed to find anything that can replace it the way that I've found decent replacements for Word (TeX, plain text) and PowerPoint (TeX, Google's Presently, KeyNote) - Benjamin Tseng

Gonna be really retro and say I much prefer lotus 1-2-3 to Excel, which I despise. IWork Numbers is ok for me you just need to learn different shortcuts, agree with Paulo Open Office is horrible, NeoOffice and Google Docs aren't bad though. Access and SQL are better for large databases though, spreadsheets were designed for small data analysis. - Sally Church

I hate OO as much as I hate Vim/Vi. - pn

Google Docs - spreadsheet works great - Susan Beebe

R :) - Daniel Swan

Spreadsheets are poor substitutes for databases. But databases can also be poor substitutes for spreadsheets (e.g. show me a sql statement to pivot or plot data)... Building a database-backed web interface that can replace Excel in a lab can be more effort than most can afford -- especially if a lot of flexibility is required. I should know, have been working on this for over a year now :-) - Eric Jain

Spreadsheets are dangerous. They are decent general purpose representations of data. But they don't handle complexity well and Microsoft has built enough hooks that groups of intelligent people dig themselves a really big hole. I.E. current financial crisis. If the models underlying a lot of theses derivatives were in SQL instead of excel we would be a lot better off - Zaki Manian

see also Sandra Potter's article "Where do you go to learn SQL? I go to the zoo" http://tinyurl.com/3cf59f - Pierre Lindenbaum

@Zaki: You must have read http://thedailywtf.com/Article... :-) - Eric Jain

@ejain Interesting article. I dated someone on the derivatives desk at Goldman for a long time. Scared the hell out me. - Zaki Manian

While I mainly use R and text files (or SQL) for data analysis, I use both Excel and Numbers for smaller data sets on my mac. Of the two, I like Numbers more, but I am in no way a power use... - Thomas Mailund

If you're using Excel for serious work, bear this issue in mind: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-21... - Andrew Clegg

Seriously? They published that? And the journal accepted it? - Walter Jessen

text file & databases + R is my daily bread and butter, but I was considering #Resolver recently see http://tinyurl.com/2jkf5y - Yann Abraham

@harijay uses Resolver and likes it a lot. Very active support on Twitter too - Deepak Singh

Wish Resolver wasn't trapped in a Windows environment. Would be very interested in it - Zaki Manian