macOS app · free

The spreadsheet someone emailed you, opened properly.

Gridly is a native Mac spreadsheet that reads and writes real Excel files. Open the .xlsx your client sent, edit it, save it back — and the formatting, formulas, merged cells and frozen panes are still exactly where Excel left them.

Apple Silicon · Signed & notarized · macOS 11+

Gridly showing a formatted quarterly forecast with formulas and a frozen header row

Every other option loses something

Numbers reflows the layout and exports something that is not quite the file you were sent. The free web viewers want an upload before they will show you a column of numbers. And a Microsoft 365 seat is a subscription for the two spreadsheets a month you actually have to open.

It opens the real file

.xlsx, .xlsm, .xls and .csv. Fonts, fills, borders, number formats, merged cells, frozen panes, column widths, hidden rows, sheet tab colours and cross-sheet references all come through — and survive being saved back out.

Formulas actually calculate

A real engine underneath, not a static viewer. Edit a cell and the totals move. Cached results from the original file are kept, so a sheet reads correctly the instant it opens.

It is a Mac app

Native window, native menus, real scrollbars and trackpad momentum, system print and Save as PDF. Double-click an .xlsx in Finder and it opens here.

Dark mode that respects the document

Follows your system appearance. Colours the workbook actually specifies are left alone — only ink that was written for a white sheet gets remapped, so a dark sheet stays readable without repainting someone else's formatting.

Editing, not just viewing

Multi-cell selection, the fill handle, cut/copy/paste carrying formulas and formatting, undo/redo, insert and delete rows and columns, sort, find, and column resizing.

Free, and the source is open

No account, no subscription, no upload. The whole thing is on GitHub if you want to read what it does with your files.

The same sheet, after dark

The green totals and the red variances are the workbook's own colours, untouched. Only the black text and hairline borders Excel drew for a white page are lifted, so nothing disappears into the background.

The same forecast in Gridly's dark mode, with the workbook's own cell colours preserved

What it does not do

  • No charts, pivot tables or macros. A workbook containing them opens and its data is fully editable, but those objects are not shown and are not written back.
  • Legacy .xls and macro-enabled .xlsm open read-only and save to an .xlsx beside the original, so the macros in the source file are never damaged.
  • Password-protected workbooks cannot be opened.
  • Apple Silicon only. Found something else? Open an issue or email me.

Open the file. Nothing moves.