I don't have excel on my home computer, so I've been using openoffice...
I'm relatively pleased with it, but wondering if there's better (also free!) options out there that just aren't as well known?

open office as good as excel, I use OP for large data

open office is a free product, they claim they are not trying to compete with the likes of Excel. they claim to do have about 80% of the features of Excel, but those 80% are the most used features. so if you are pushing the boundaries then you need to look at paid for product

Our company is a microsoft partner so we use MS Office a lot here. However, we've also got a few people using OO. I've even spent some time in OO and I have to say, impressive! Where Excel is concerned, I wouldn't have a problem using OO for that. However, where MS Word is concerned I think I'll stick with MS Word.

I realize this is thread on Excel vs OO, but they are both "packages" and if one key part is weak it affects the whole package.

Also, my programming team attempted to integrate with OO. They found it not so easy to do and we scrapped it for now.

Anyway, my 2 cents.

Bradley