Nought vs Microsoft Excel for Mac

I build Nought, so this is not a neutral referee’s scorecard. But comparing a young, free spreadsheet to the most established one on the planet only works if I’m straight about where Excel wins, and it wins in plenty of places.

Where Excel is still the answer

Excel is the deepest spreadsheet ever made. Pivot tables, Power Query, Power Pivot, VBA macros, hundreds of functions, and the specific behaviour that thousands of corporate models depend on. If your work involves any of that, or if you exchange complex workbooks with people who will open them in Excel and expect pixel-identical results, Excel is not a preference, it is a requirement. Nought now has real pivot tables and JavaScript macros, but not Power Query, Power Pivot, or VBA execution. If your models depend on those, Excel is not a preference, it is a requirement.

Where Nought wins

Price. Excel comes with Microsoft 365, around $99.99 a year for Personal in the US as of August 2026, or as a one-time Office purchase. Nought is a free 14 day trial, then $9.99 once, with no account and no subscription.

Weight and speed. Nought is a native Mac app, a 9 MB download that opens instantly. Excel is a large install and carries decades of accumulated interface. For opening a file, reading it, making a few edits and saving, Nought gets out of your way faster.

It is genuinely native. Nought is built for macOS: the real font panel, the system colour picker, proper full-screen, the Mac keyboard shortcuts you expect. Excel on Mac is a port, and it feels like one in small ways all day long.

Your files stay yours. No cloud requirement, no telemetry account, no sign-in. Nought opens the .xlsx on your disk and saves it back as .xlsx.

The compatibility question

This is the one that matters most, because a spreadsheet that damages your files is worse than no spreadsheet. Nought reads and writes real .xlsx. It writes standards-correct charts that open in Excel without the “we found a problem” repair prompt, and it reads charts made in Excel keeping their legend, series colours and axis titles. Formulas, number formats, and cell styling round-trip. Where Nought meets a feature it does not yet support, it warns you before saving rather than dropping it silently, so you know what a round trip would cost.

Excel is still the fidelity benchmark, and for the most elaborate workbooks it will render things Nought cannot. But for everyday spreadsheets, the round trip holds.

Who should switch, and who should not

Stay with Excel if you rely on Power Query, Power Pivot, VBA, or exact fidelity on complex shared models. Try Nought if you want a fast, native, offline spreadsheet for opening and editing .xlsx files without paying a yearly subscription, and your work is ordinary spreadsheet work: tables, formulas, formatting, the occasional chart.

Get Nought on the App Store and open one of your own files. That is the only test that counts.