LibreOffice Calc
Spreadsheets Germany
Free desktop spreadsheet with pivot tables, charts and XLSX support. Alternative to Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel.
Details
LibreOffice Calc is the spreadsheet in the LibreOffice suite from The Document Foundation in Berlin, released under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 and free of charge on Windows, macOS and Linux. It reads and writes .xlsx alongside OpenDocument, calculates locally, and handles the same 1,048,576-row sheet limit as Excel.
The everyday feature set is there: several hundred functions, pivot tables, charts, conditional formatting, data validation, multiple-sheet references, Solver, and scripting in Basic, Python or JavaScript. For most people writing formulas and producing charts, nothing is missing.
The gap opens above the grid. Excel’s data-engineering layer — Power Query for repeatable imports, Power Pivot with DAX for multi-table models — has no Calc equivalent at all, and VBA macros do not run. That matters more in spreadsheets than in documents, because the professional dependency concentrates exactly there. Round-trip of complex workbooks is also less reliable than for documents: conditional formats, pivot caches and some newer dynamic-array functions can shift.
There is no live co-authoring on the desktop. Collabora Online Calc puts the same engine in a browser if that is what you need.
About The Document Foundation
The Document Foundation is the German charitable foundation behind LibreOffice. Its imprint names the entity at Winterfeldtstraße 52, 10781 Berlin and states its legal form outright — a “gemeinnützige rechtsfähige Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts”, a charitable foundation with legal capacity under German civil law — with VAT number DE 295589870 and supervision by the Berlin Senatsverwaltung für Justiz und Verbraucherschutz, Stiftungsaufsicht.
The legal form settles the ownership question rather than merely answering it. A German Stiftung has no shareholders and no members who own it, so there is no parent to chase and no cap table to flip. The board of directors is elected from the project’s own contributors, and the foundation is funded by donations and corporate sponsorship rather than equity.
It was founded in 2010 when the OpenOffice.org community left Oracle, and it also hosts the Document Liberation Project, which builds converters out of proprietary file formats into ODF. LibreOffice itself ships under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 and is free in both senses; several companies, Collabora among them, sell support and derived products built on the same codebase.
