VisiGrid

VisiGrid is a spreadsheet built the way a modern code editor is built.

It opens in about 300ms to a usable cell — no splash screen, no sign-in, no waiting. The Windows installer is 9.5 MB and the Mac build is 27 MB, against a multi-gigabyte Office install. It starts fast because there is almost nothing to load.

Every action has a keyboard path. Cmd+K opens a fuzzy-searchable command palette, so you find "freeze panes" by typing three letters instead of hunting through a ribbon. There are 159 documented shortcuts, your muscle memory from Excel mostly transfers, and there is a full Vim mode if that is how you work. Nothing requires the mouse.

It opens .xlsx, .xls, .xlsb and .ods files and exports back to .xlsx, so it drops into an existing workflow rather than asking you to migrate. 123 built-in formula functions, conditional formatting, sort and filter, and a cell inspector that shows exactly which cells produced any number.

Other things borrowed from code editors: a problems panel listing every broken formula in one place, instant navigation to any cell or sheet, sandboxed Lua scripting instead of macros, and a command-line version (vgrid) that runs the same engine headlessly — calculate, diff two spreadsheets, convert formats, or verify a workbook in CI.

It runs entirely on your machine. No account, no telemetry, no cloud requirement, and it works on a plane. The formula engine recalculates when you ask rather than silently between sessions, so opening a file twice gives the same numbers.

Free and open source under AGPLv3. An optional Pro licence adds larger-file support and cloud sync.