Spreadsheet software is important for homes, students and businesses, so we’ve put together a lineup with something for all these arenas. We chose good-quality spreadsheet software, with a solid mix of paid-for and free products. To avoid oversimplifying things, we opted not to include very basic models that don’t provide anything other than a basic grid, and we haven’t included programs that aren’t secure, as spreadsheets often deal with sensitive or important data.
We looked at compatibility, versatility, features and available support to determine which spreadsheets deserved a spot on our lineup. If you need a complete office suite, take a look at our office software guide, where you’ll find a nice mix of free and priced options. On this site you will find articles related to spreadsheets as well as reviews of spreadsheet software.
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Best Spreadsheet Software for Businesses
Microsoft Excel is our choice for the best spreadsheet software for businesses because of its versatility and functionality. Businesses need software they can rely on, and Excel fits the bill, helping you stay on track with simple or complex spreadsheets. There is an extensive range of formulas that you can use to make calculations or perform specific functions, and you can filter data according to your business needs.
This professional-grade software isn’t free, but it is available with a reasonable monthly subscription, and even after several decades, it’s still the most respected office spreadsheet solution. This software works across PC, Mac and mobile devices. With OneDrive, you can share and access your spreadsheets in the cloud from anywhere and work on them collaboratively. The majority of other file formats are compatible with Excel files, so should someone send you a file in another file format, Excel should be able to open it and render the contents correctly.
Microsoft Excel
Excel is part of the Microsoft Office suite and works well in conjunction with the other programs in the bundle. You can purchase Excel as a stand-alone product, as part of a desktop suite or as part of Office 365. It’s most functional and most cost-effective as part of the Microsoft Office desktop suite or as part of Office 365.
Read more hereBest Spreadsheet Software for Students
Many of these spreadsheet programs would serve schools and students well. However, LibreOffice Calc stands out because it’s free and open source, so there are no licensing restrictions. This means that schools can provide students with copies of the software and install the software across multiple PCs and laptops without significant expense, and without breaching any licensing terms that may be associated with similar software. Choosing a well-rounded free program also means that any student with a computer can access the software, so it puts every student on a level playing field. Additionally, because it’s open source, LibreOffice, including its Calc software, is a great educational tool for students working on digital and programming skills.
This spreadsheet software has plenty of features and is versatile enough to equal its biggest premium-cost rivals. It has an impressive selection of templates and allows students to create their own or import them from third-party sources. Students and teachers can also use extensions or add-ons designed to increase Calc’s versatility as an educational tool.
LibreOffice Calc
Calc is the spreadsheet software included with LibreOffice. It’s a popular choice for academic, home and business users looking for an inexpensive spreadsheet program because it’s open source. Souled american sonny rar. The whole office suite it comes in is free and doesn’t have any licensing restrictions.
Read more hereBest Spreadsheet Software for Home Users
For home users, Google Sheets is our first choice. Part of the Google Apps suite and connected to Google Drive, this spreadsheet software is versatile, free to use and user-friendly. You can easily create to-do lists, schedules and holiday shopping lists, then access them from any computer or mobile device with the Google Drive app. Because it has an array of formulas ready for use, along with a huge number of commonly used templates, this spreadsheet application makes it easy to keep track of home or business finances and to create budgets, calendars, planners, invoices and time sheets.
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This is a web-based spreadsheet application, making it easy to access, and you get a generous amount of free cloud storage when you sign up. With its free, easy accessibility and simple usage, Google Sheets is attractive to all kinds of users. It’s easy to share your spreadsheets via email invitation or a link, as well as to set read-only, comment or edit permissions for each person you share with.
Google Sheets
Google Sheets is part of the Google Apps suite. Like the rest of the suite's productivity applications, it has a focus on easy collaboration and a simple, user-friendly interface. While it’s not available as a stand-alone application, you’ll likely find yourself using at least some of the other apps on a regular basis.
Read more hereCompatibility
Compatibility with Microsoft Excel files is key for any spreadsheet software, simply because so many people use that program to create spreadsheets. Therefore, the spreadsheet software you choose should be able to read and write XLS and XLSX files and render them correctly. Choose software that allows you to easily convert your files into PDF format if you want to ensure your spreadsheets cannot be easily altered without leaving an electronic footprint. Creating PDF files also reduces file sizes and lets you easily add password protection. If you create spreadsheets that you want to publish online, choose a program that lets you easily convert spreadsheets into HTML.
Versatility
How versatile your spreadsheet software should be depends entirely on what you want to use it for. If you’re a student or a professional wanting to impress with your presentation or data collation, you need to be able to integrate graphics and alter the fonts, colors and other aesthetic qualities. If you want simple visual representations of your collected data, you need to be able to easily create charts from your entries.
Consider whether you need remote or mobile access to your spreadsheets. If so, you need an easily shareable or cloud-compatible application. For those who work collaboratively, it’s important to have spreadsheet software that allows simultaneous editing and multi-user functionality. If all you want to do is save, email and print spreadsheets, a desktop-only program will suffice.
Features
The best spreadsheet software programs have extensive formula selections that are easily accessible. Your software should also have a variety of templates on hand for common spreadsheets so you don’t have to lay out budget sheets, calendars and planners from scratch every time. If you’re sharing or collaborating with other people, make sure you can lock or freeze specific columns so others can’t accidentally edit or overwrite them.
Also note how many rows and columns a spreadsheet can accommodate. Some are unlimited, while others restrict you to just 250. If you deal with complex or large quantities of data, choosing a spreadsheet application that features pivot tables makes sense, as they provide an easy way of summarizing data.
Support
Whether you’re an advanced user or a novice, it's invaluable for your software to have a solid support system, including plenty of tutorials, step-by-step instructions and FAQs pages. Having email, phone and forum support at your disposal helps to ensure you don’t get stuck without a solution.
OCR
Editor Rating: Excellent (4.0)
US Street Price$500.00
Pros
Fast recognition. Improved interface with Start Page. Cloud connectivity. Strong on automation and other ancillary features.Cons
Bottom Line
OmniPage Professional 18 remains one of the most capable OCR programs on the planet, both for its core task of text recognition and its long list of related capabilities.
Building on the solid foundation that was OmniPage Professional 17, Nuance OmniPage Professional 18 ($499.99 direct) offers all the same strengths, from fast speed to powerful automation tools. It also adds features, most notably cloud connectivity and a new tool for recognizing PDF files. And it improves its interface--precisely the issue that kept version 17 from being an Editors' Choice. Unfortunately, the interface can still be a bit frustrating to use. If you're willing to put up with it, though, OmniPage is one of the most capable OCR programs available, especially for high-volume, automated OCR applications.
When we reviewed OmniPage 17, one of the complaints we had about the interface was that, unlike Readiris Corporate 12 ($399 direct, 2.5 stars) or the current Editors' Choice ABBYY FineReader 10 ($399 direct, 4.5 stars), OmniPage didn't offer a startup menu of common tasks, such as scanning to a PDF or Word file.
That objection has been addressed in OmniPage 18 with a Start Page that offers a list of common tasks. Click on a task, and the program hand carries you through each step from scanning or loading a file to saving the result. The various choices start with a camera image, PDF file, or scanned document and end up with an Excel, Word, or OmniPage document; a Searchable PDF; or a speech file (a WAV file you can play like an audio book). Although the Start page can make some tasks easy however, it doesn't come into play if you bypass the options and go directly to OmniPage's more basic interface. But more on that later.
Accuracy
Top-tier OCR programs like OmniPage have long since reached the point where text recognition accuracy isn't much of an issue and is impractical to test for. With accuracy already in the range of 98 percent or better, a small improvement, like the claimed 18 percent greater accuracy for OmniPage Professional 18, is hard to confirm without testing hundreds, or even thousands, of originals.
Top-tier OCR programs like OmniPage have long since reached the point where text recognition accuracy isn't much of an issue and is impractical to test for. With accuracy already in the range of 98 percent or better, a small improvement, like the claimed 18 percent greater accuracy for OmniPage Professional 18, is hard to confirm without testing hundreds, or even thousands, of originals.
The simple truth is that if you need 100 percent accuracy, you'll have to proofread the result. If you can live with occasional errors, my tests confirm that OmniPage 18 makes few recognition mistakes. I ran across a user review on one Web site recently that complained about OmniPage Professional 18 having one or two errors in every seven or eight pages. Assuming only 250 words per page, which is about the fewest you could expect for any page format, and two errors per eight pages, that would work out to one error every 1000 words, or 99.99 percent word accuracy. (The complaint obviously came from a seriously overboard perfectionist.)
Nuance Omnipage Professional 18 Download
Format accuracy is even harder to test for. Nuance claims a 67 percent improvement in OmniPage Professional 18, but if you try to test for formatting errors, the number you come up with will depend on both the originals you use and how you count errors. If the program makes the same mistake 100 times in one heavily formatted document, for example, you'll get a different number if you count it as a single mistake than if you count it as 100 separate mistakes.
The most useful information I can give is that with my suite of test files, when sending files to an editable format, OmniPage Professional 18 did at least as well as Readiris and FineReader overall. For most text pages, it created Word files that needed no fixes in the format, with only minor fixes needed in the rest.
It had a problem creating spreadsheets from tables that had more than one line of text per row in some cells, putting each line in its own spreadsheet row, and requiring time-consuming manual fixes. However, I have yet to see a program that does any better with this format.
New Features
OmniPage Professional 18 doesn't offer many new features. The two most important are the ones I've already mentioned: cloud connectivity and the new PDF tool, eDiscovery Assistant for searchable PDF. For cloud connectivity, the idea is to let you easily download pages someone else has left for you and then upload the recognized text. OmniPage offers menu choices for Evernote and Dropbox, both for getting pages from both sites, and sending pages back when you're finished. In addition, Nuance Cloud Connector lets you do much the same thing with any number of other services, according to Nuance, including Microsoft Live SkyDrive, GoogleDocs, and Box.net.
OmniPage Professional 18 doesn't offer many new features. The two most important are the ones I've already mentioned: cloud connectivity and the new PDF tool, eDiscovery Assistant for searchable PDF. For cloud connectivity, the idea is to let you easily download pages someone else has left for you and then upload the recognized text. OmniPage offers menu choices for Evernote and Dropbox, both for getting pages from both sites, and sending pages back when you're finished. In addition, Nuance Cloud Connector lets you do much the same thing with any number of other services, according to Nuance, including Microsoft Live SkyDrive, GoogleDocs, and Box.net.
The eDiscovery Assistant lets you convert individual PDF image files or batches of files to searchable PDF format, with the choice of manually proofing each file or letting the process run automatically from beginning to end. The advantage, compared to simply recognizing the text in the files, is that eDiscovery assistant will leave bookmarks, annotations, and other added information in the file rather than wiping them out.
More on the Interface
If you bypass the Start page, you'll see an interface that's similar to the one in earlier versions of the program, with the choice of using Quick Convert, Classic, or Flexible view. I found the Flexible view highly frustrating. It theoretically lets you drag various windows around--the page image window, text editor window, and more--to customize the screen. What I quickly found out was that instead of letting me move the windows to the positions I wanted, the program insists on snapping them into various predetermined positions.
If you bypass the Start page, you'll see an interface that's similar to the one in earlier versions of the program, with the choice of using Quick Convert, Classic, or Flexible view. I found the Flexible view highly frustrating. It theoretically lets you drag various windows around--the page image window, text editor window, and more--to customize the screen. What I quickly found out was that instead of letting me move the windows to the positions I wanted, the program insists on snapping them into various predetermined positions.
This is more than a little frustrating and eventually lead me to turn off Flexible view in favor of Classic view, even though I would have preferred being able to customize the window layout. The program ought to let me turn off the snap into place feature, with a setting option that's easy to find. As it is, the main effect of Flexible view is to make the program frustrating to use.
Other Features
One of the pluses for OmniPage that often gets missed in focusing on the core OCR capability is how much else the program does. I've already alluded to the text to speech feature that lets you create what amounts to your own audio books as WAV files. Text to speech works within the program as a proofreading aid too, which can be particularly helpful for checking numbers in tables.
One of the pluses for OmniPage that often gets missed in focusing on the core OCR capability is how much else the program does. I've already alluded to the text to speech feature that lets you create what amounts to your own audio books as WAV files. Text to speech works within the program as a proofreading aid too, which can be particularly helpful for checking numbers in tables.
OmniPage also offers a Kindle Assistant to essentially create eBooks, by sending OCRd documents to a Kindle; it lets you compress PDF format files using MRC compression technology; and it lets you define workflows to help automate the OCR process for individual documents, for batches of already scanned documents, and for monitoring Windows folders to automatically OCR anything that's scanned to the folder.
Also very much worth mention are the program's annotation tools for marking text with redactions, highlights, and strikethroughs, and its digital enhancement tools to help clean up originals and improve recognition accuracy. One of the most impressive enhancement features is the automatic straightening of the visually curved lines of text in photos of book pages.
Note too the Legal Pleading layout option, which won't get confused by the numbers on the left side of the page of many legal documents. It even gives you the option to either keep them or delete them. And, finally, OmniPage Professional 18 also comes with Nuance PaperPort 12 for document management and PDF Create for creating PDF files from any Windows program.
The frustrating interface remains the only issue that keeps the program from sharing the Editors' Choice with FineReader 10. Even so, there's no question that OmniPage Professional 18's combination of speed, automation, and long list of ancillary features makes it one of the most capable OCR programs on the planet. If you're willing to deal with the interface, or don't find it a problem, OmniPage may well be your best choice for OCR.
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