Our accountant emailed us a spreadsheet template that we need to fill out. Before our hard drive died, I had an, ahem, free copy of Office for Mac that would open up Excel files. We don't have that anymore. Is there anything I can use to just open a simple Excel file, enter the figures and save in a format that my accountant's bean counters can open on their Windows machine?

Apart from this one time, we never ever use spreadsheets at Casa Deadly, so being tight about it, I'm looking for something free. Failing that, should I just download the MS Office Test Drive?

open office.

Mac Numbers opens up just about any excel spreadsheet. May loose the odd function but not many in my experience.

Do it all the time now, rarely use Excel, just numbers

Would Open Office do it?

OpenOrifice

This all depends on if you accountant has any fancy jiggery pokery going on in the template. If there are loads of macros and vba script, then you are probably going to have problems with the open source / numbers alternatives.

Another option would be to load into Google docs and populate it their.

Thanks all, will look into those suggestions and come back if not working. iwork won't let me open numbers on my machine. Thought it was free. Grrr

neoOffice – mac specific OO fork.

Ive got a copy of Mac office 2008 professional here I could do you a good price on…..dont need it anymore cos I stuck with a PC. Its unopened/unregistered etc

Always the online office function in Google Docs