How to Open .xlsx Files on Mac Without Excel

Someone sends you an .xlsx file. You double-click it on your Mac and nothing useful happens, because you don’t have Excel and you are not about to pay $99.99 a year (Microsoft 365 Personal, US, 2026) to read one spreadsheet.

You don’t have to. Here are five ways to open .xlsx files on a Mac without giving Microsoft your card. I built one of them, so it goes first, but the others are real and some are excellent.

1. Nought

You’re on my site, so you saw this coming. Nought is a native Mac spreadsheet that opens .xlsx files directly, edits them in place, and saves them back as .xlsx. No account, no cloud, no conversion step. It is a 5.6 MB download, 11 MB installed, and free on the Mac App Store.

Get it on the App Store, open your file, done. It is not a full office suite, but it is a full spreadsheet: 200+ functions, 23 chart types, pivot tables, conditional formatting and macros. For a quick open-edit-save on a real Excel file, it is built for exactly that. Bias disclosed. Here is the rest of the field.

2. Apple Numbers

Numbers is already on your Mac. Right-click the file, Open With, Numbers. For a simple sheet it works well and costs nothing. The catch is the round trip: Numbers converts the file into its own format, so if you edit and export back to .xlsx the formatting can shift and some formulas or charts may not survive. Great for reading and light editing; risky if the file has to go back to an Excel user unchanged.

3. Google Sheets

Free, and unbeatable for collaboration. Upload the .xlsx to Google Drive, open it in Sheets, and it converts to Google’s format. You will need a Google account and a connection, and downloading back to .xlsx is another conversion. If several people need to edit at once, this is the answer. For a private local file, it is more steps than you may want.

4. LibreOffice Calc

If you need serious editing and want to pay nobody, LibreOffice understands Office formats better than most free tools. Full suite, open source, free. The downsides are that it does not feel like a Mac app and the macOS download is around 285 MB. Capable and free, if you can live with the weight and the interface.

5. The web version of Excel

Microsoft offers a free, cut-down Excel in the browser at office.com. Sign in with a free Microsoft account, upload the file, and edit online. It is real Excel compatibility for basic work, but it needs an account and the internet, and the free tier is missing a lot of the desktop features.

Which should you use?

• Quick native open-edit-save, offline: Nought.
• Simple file, already on your Mac: Numbers.
• Live collaboration: Google Sheets.
• Heavy editing, free, don’t mind the weight: LibreOffice.
• Occasional Excel-accurate edits in a browser: Excel for the web.

Whatever you pick, you do not need to pay Microsoft to read a spreadsheet on your Mac.