I have used EXCEL on a pc and plan on converting to an IMAC.

You can purchase or subscribe to Office on your Mac.

Believe it or not, Microsoft Excel was available on the Mac 2 years before it became available on Windows. It was released on the Mac in September of 1985. It didn’t come out for Windows until 1987.

KiltedTim wrote:

You can purchase or subscribe to Office on your Mac.

Believe it or not, Microsoft Excel was available on the Mac 2 years before it became available on Windows. It was released on the Mac in September of 1985. It didn’t come out for Windows until 1987.

The GUI version of Microsoft Word also came out on the Mac long before it came out on Windows.

If I remember correctly, Lotus 1-2-3 used to be the "800 pound gorilla" of the IBM PC office suite market, back in the DOS days. The vendor dragged their feet on adapting their program for Windows. Meanwhile, Microsoft took what they had learned from building GUI applications (Word, Multiplan, Excel) for the Mac and released Windows-based Office applications. That let Microsoft take over the highly lucrative office suite application market.

Be aware that certain advanced functions may either be unavailable or not work well on macOS Excel. See https://spreadsheeto.com/mac-vs-windows/. This is obviously not an issue if you have a Windows machine handy. It’s never an issue if you use it for routine stuff i.e. don’t import huge data sets, perform conversions etc.

As mentioned previously if you're not a power Excel user the free app, LibreOffice is a good alternative. It can open and edit MS Office files and save them as Office files or its own format. I converted to it when Catalina came out and killed support for any 32 bit apps, which my version of MS Office was.

If you must have Excel then either the one time purchase of Office Home & Student 2021 version or the subscription MS Office 365 would be your options.

If you’re a long time Excel user or an Excel power user, probably not. Numbers is functional and fairly powerful, but making the transition from Excel is not as easy as one would hope.

If you’re a casual Excel user, using it for things like basic home budgets, etc. then it may be perfectly suitable for what you need. There is a learning curve, but it has some useful unique features.

If your existing Excel files aren’t overly complex, they should convert fairly well.

You can get Microsoft Office for the Mac.

You can also use Apple's Numbers.