All ways of opening Microsoft Excel spreadsheets can be divided into an online and offline category. The online category usually requires an account at some website before the spreadsheets can be worked with.

Computer Software Programs:

Excel Viewer [link]

Microsoft’s own Excel Viewer can be used to view Excel 2007 (xlsx) and earlier Excel spreadsheets. It has a download size of 74 Megabytes and uses the same core that Microsoft Excel uses which ensures a good compatibility with all Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

Open Office [link]

Open Office is considered to be the Microsoft Office alternative. It is a free Open Source office suite that can be used to open Microsoft Office document formats. The module needed to open Excel spreadsheets is called Calc and supports the new Excel 2007 xlsx format but also older Microsoft Excel documents.

Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack [link]

Users who have a previous version of Microsoft Office or Microsoft Excel installed (that is pre-Excel 2007) can use the Microsoft Office compatibility pack to add support for the Excel xlsx format so that these spreadsheets can also be worked with in previous versions of Excel.

XLS Viewer 2.30 [link]

The XLS Viewer has a tiny size of just 1 Megabyte. It can open, display and print xls, xlsx and ods documents that have been created with Microsoft Office or Open Office. The computer program seems to have slight problems displaying complex spreadsheets correctly.

Online Tools

Google Docs [link]

Google Docs has only recently added support for the Excel 2007 xlsx format. The online service was able to work with standard xls documents before but the new feature makes it possible to open and work with all Excel documents in Google Docs.

Thinkfree [link]

Can be used to quickly view spreadsheets online.Supports both old and new Excel spreadsheets and various other formats.

Zoho Sheets [link]

Zoho Sheets is an online product that enables users to view and edit spreadsheets online.

Do you know of other online or offline tools that can be used to view spreadsheets? Let us know in the comments.

Each can then be accessed like any other folder in the Windows operating system. Integrating Google Docs would for example display all documents that are stored in that service on the local computer desktop. Gladinet will automatically synchronize the folders whenever data is edited, added or removed from one of the installed data storage services.

New online storage services and applications are added by providing authentication information in a simple form, usually the username and password to access the service online. Some, like WebDav servers require an url, IP or additional information besides the basic authentication data.

Gladinet runs in the Windows system tray on the local computer system from where it can be accessed and configured. It only takes a few clicks to add a new online storage service in the software. The professional and premium editions of the service add new features to the software including:

• Advanced Task Scheduler/Manager (Run Once or Recurring with Pause, Resume and Reschedule Support)
• Incremental Backup to Mounted Cloud Storage (with File Type Filtering*)
• Advanced Download/Upload Acceleration Technology (Compression, Chunking, Parallel Uploads/Downloads, Bandwidth Throttling)
• Encrypted Local Profile and In-Memory-Only Profile for Better Security
• IIS/Apache Support (Avoid Port 80)

Users who regularly work with the previously mentioned cloud storage providers might want to give Gladinet a try.