Viewing Excel sheet where Excel is not installed

N

Newbier

Hi. I want to send a friend an Excel sheet I've put together but he has no Excel. How can he be able to view it? thanks.
 
D

Dave Peterson

C

CMM

Wow. What bad advice. A 90MB download to install the slow-as-mollasses
OpenOffice vs a 3mb one to install the Free Excel Viewer.
 
C

CMM

Easiest solution (if they only want to "view" the file)
Save As...
And select Web Page from the drop down list.

If you have pictures or graphs in the file, Excel 2003 has a fantastic
"Single Web Page" option that puts all those pictures in the same
easy-to-e-mail file. Not sure if 2002 has the same option. In 2000 Save As
Web Page works well, but pictures are placed in a subfolder that complements
the htm file.
 
D

Dave Peterson

If I didn't have excel and needed a spreadsheet program, I think that OpenOffice
would be the first one I looked at. With the proliferation of highspeed
connections (or even ordering a CD), this option would be cheap compared to
buying office or even just excel.

I would bet that this is one reason Bob suggested it in a followup to the post
already suggesting the xl viewer.
 
C

CMM

You can't beat free... at first glance... but OpenOffice is a bear... I'd
rather spend $50 and get the very inexpensive MS Works (not Suite) or just a
couple of bucks more and get WordPerfect Office For Home.
 
H

Harlan Grove

CMM wrote...
You can't beat free... at first glance... but OpenOffice is a bear... I'd
rather spend $50 and get the very inexpensive MS Works (not Suite) or just a
couple of bucks more and get WordPerfect Office For Home.
Click to expand...
....

MS Works is pathetic, and recommending it as an Excel viewer is
incompetent since Works can't handle anything more than Excel 3.0
single worksheet .XLS files (if it can even handle those).

Agreed that OpenOffice Calc is big and slow, but the alternatives that
can handle array formulas are few. Slow as it may be, OOo Calc is less
crash-prone than Quattro Pro. Another slow alternative is the Windows
port of Gnumeric. That's the full extent of Windows spreadsheets that
can handle array formulas in Excel workbooks. The Windows port of Xess
provides a roughly comparable facility, but it doesn't handle Excel
array formulas reliably.

Without array formulas, there are several free alternatives much more
capable than Works. Just look through Google's Web Directory for
Spreadsheets,

http://www.google.com/Top/Computers/Software/Spreadsheets/

and Office Suites,

http://www.google.com/Top/Computers/Software/Office_Suites/

The ThinkFree, 602Pro, ProPack and Ability suites would be the ones to
check out. It'd be remarkable if any of them were less robust than
Quattro Pro. [I used to like QP, and I used it at work rather than 123
back in the early 1990s, but it's been clearly inferior to coeval Excel
and 123 from version 5 on.]

But for a few dollars more, recent but not current versions of Lotus
Smartsuite would be arguably money better spent (and not all that much
money). 123 lacks support for array formulas, but it's still the most
polished and most robust alternative to Excel, and it'll load Excel
97/2K/XP/2003 .XLS multiple worksheet files.
 
K

Ken Wright

And if by any chance the workbook were to be corrupt, the Op would also
probably have more chance of recovering it with OpenOffice than Excel itself
:)

--
Regards
Ken....................... Microsoft MVP - Excel
Sys Spec - Win XP Pro / XL 97/00/02/03

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It's easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission :)
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Harlan Grove said:
Agreed that OpenOffice Calc is big and slow, but the alternatives that
can handle array formulas are few. Slow as it may be, OOo Calc is less
crash-prone than Quattro Pro.
Click to expand...
<snip>
 
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