Excel Replacement

I have recently found that pages can open word .doc's and keynote can open .ppt and both are much faster (on the mac) than their microsoft counterparts. Probably because they were built for the Mac OS and Office was built for Windows. I was wondering if there is a Mac counterpart for excel that can run fast and open/edit excel files.

NeoOffice's calc spreadsheet opens Excel stuff nearly flawlessly (doesn't support pivot tables though, so I hear). Other than that, it is great. NeoOffice is the Mac version of OpenOffice. It is a wonderful set, with counterparts for Word, Powerpoint, Excel and Access. Like MS Office, however, it is big and somewhat slow to load.

Some other ideas: for Word alternatives, check out Abiword, and excellent open source word processor with a full Mac version available. It reads and writes Word format, although it is not a perfect clone of Word in any sense. However, for run of the mill word processing it is wonderful.

For Excel alternatives, check out the gnumeric spreadsheet. It is a 99% clone of Excel. It is an open source app, so you will need Apple's X11 installed (available on your Tiger install DVD).

BTW, both Abiword and gnumeric are lightning fast to load and run. A real refreshing change from the usual "office" type software.