How to open and edit a .xlsx file on a Mac without Excel

A .xlsx file can arrive on a Mac with no copy of Excel. The Mac can still handle it: Quick Look is part of macOS, Numbers comes from the App Store, Google Sheets works in a browser, and LibreOffice is a free download. This guide goes through each way in turn, with the exact steps and what each one cannot do.

In the Finder, with Quick Look

Quick Look shows the contents of a file without opening an app. Apple says “Quick Look offers a fast, full-size preview of nearly any kind of file without opening the file”, and it works on items in Finder windows, on the desktop, in emails and messages, and other places.

In the Finder, select the file, then press the Space bar. A Quick Look window opens.
To open the file in an app from the preview, click “Open with [App]”.
Press the Space bar again or click the close button to close the Quick Look window.

This method is for looking only. Apple’s Quick Look page lists rotating, Markup and trimming audio or video as the edits available in the Quick Look window; it lists no way to change the contents of a spreadsheet.

Apple’s user-facing Quick Look page does not name .xlsx specifically; the Microsoft Office statement comes from Apple’s developer documentation, which says Quick Look “can generate previews for common file types, including: iWork and Microsoft Office documents”, and adds nothing about how faithful the preview is.

In Numbers, Apple’s spreadsheet

Numbers is Apple’s spreadsheet, and it opens Excel files for editing. Apple says “You can open Microsoft Excel spreadsheets (files with a .xls or .xlsx filename extension), delimited text files, or fixed-width text files into Numbers and make changes to them”. If you don’t have Numbers on your Mac, you can get it from the App Store.

Drag the Excel file to the Numbers icon in the Dock or in the Applications folder (double-clicking the file opens Excel if you have that app). Or in Numbers choose File > Open and select the Excel file.
Edit the spreadsheet in Numbers.
To get an Excel file back, choose File > Export To > Excel (File > Export To > [file format], from the File menu at the top of your screen).
Choose whether to create a worksheet for each table or for each sheet, click Save, type a name, choose a location, then click Export.

Numbers never edits the .xlsx itself. Apple describes opening an Excel file in Numbers as converting it, and says “The original file remains intact after you convert it”; an Excel file comes back only as an exported copy, and “Any changes you make to the exported spreadsheet don’t affect the original”. The export format is “Microsoft Excel Office Open XML (XLSX)”, along with PDF, CSV and TSV, and there is a second route to the same result: with the file open, click the Share button in the toolbar, click Export and Send, then choose Excel.

Two things to expect along the way. When the file opens, “you might get a message that fonts are missing or that the file will look different in other ways”. And on export Numbers asks whether to create a worksheet for each table or for each sheet, because a Numbers sheet can hold several tables; as Apple puts it, “If you create a separate worksheet for each table, you can include a summary worksheet with links to all the tables”.

In the browser, with Google Sheets

Google Drive edits Office files in place, in the browser. Google says “When you upload Office files to Google Drive, you can edit, comment, and collaborate directly on Office files when you use Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides”. Converting to a Google Sheets file is a separate, optional step, and “When you convert, you make a copy of your Office file”.

On your computer, go to drive.google.com.
At the top left, click New, then File Upload, and choose the file. (You can also drag the file into a Google Drive folder.)
In Google Drive, double-click the Office file. It opens in Google Sheets.
Edit the file. Changes are saved to the file in its original Office format.

The file has to be uploaded to Google Drive first, and the editing happens in Google’s web apps, not on the Mac. Google lists some things as not supported when editing Office files in Docs, Sheets or Slides: macros, for which it says “you can implement your macro in Apps Script”, and “Linked spreadsheets in Excel files”.

Protection does not carry across. Google says “When you transfer protected workbooks and worksheets from Excel to Google Sheets, your locked and hidden cells become viewable and editable in Google Sheets”. A password-protected .xlsx can be opened in Edit mode, but Google warns that choosing Edit removes the password from the file for all users.

In LibreOffice Calc, a free download

LibreOffice is a free and open source office suite; its site says it “provides unfettered access to our office productivity tools, at no cost to you”. Its help says “LibreOffice can open and save documents in the Microsoft Office file formats, including Microsoft Office Open XML formats”, and lists Microsoft Excel, *.xls, *.xlsx as opening in LibreOffice Calc. A Mac needs macOS 11 or newer and an Intel or Apple silicon processor.

Install LibreOffice from libreoffice.org.
Choose File - Open, then select the Microsoft Office file in the LibreOffice file open dialog. It opens in LibreOffice Calc.
To keep the Microsoft format when saving, choose File - Save As and, in the File type box, select a Microsoft Office file format.

Converted files can need tidying up. LibreOffice’s help says some layout features and formatting attributes in more complex Microsoft Office documents “are handled differently in LibreOffice or are unsupported. As a result, converted files require some degree of manual reformatting”. For Microsoft Excel it lists these features as ones that “may cause conversion challenges”: AutoShapes, OLE objects, certain controls and Microsoft Office form fields, pivot tables, new chart types, conditional formatting, and some functions and formulas.

Macro code mostly does not carry over: LibreOffice’s help says that, with a few exceptions, Microsoft Office and LibreOffice cannot run the same macro code, though recent versions “can also run some Excel Visual Basic scripts, if you enable this feature” under Load/Save - VBA Properties. Formulas can differ too. LibreOffice gives the example of TRUE in A1 and A2, where Calc’s =SUM(A1;A2) returns 2 while Excel’s =SUM(A1,A2) returns 0.

With Tally

Tally is our spreadsheet for the Mac, one “that works like the one you know: the same ribbon, formula bar, grid, shortcuts and menus, and .xlsx files”. The .xlsx format is native to it, read and written by Tally’s own code, so Tally opens and saves the file itself rather than converting it to another format. Values, formulas, number formats, fonts, colours, fills, borders, alignment, wrapping, column widths, row heights, hidden rows and columns, merged cells, frozen panes, filters, sheet order and names, the selection and the zoom are kept; .csv opens and saves the sheet in front, and PDF is an export.

There are 172 built-in functions, and the formula engine is tested against Excel’s results. The grid draws only what is in view, “so a sheet of a million rows scrolls like a small one”. Not in version 1: charts, tables (Format as Table), pivot tables, conditional formatting, data validation, comments, named ranges, cell styles, images and shapes, the Insert, Draw, Page Layout and Review tabs, the Format Cells dialog, array formulas that spill, selecting several separate ranges at once, protection, macros, and working on one file with other people; “A file that has these opens, but they are not shown and are not kept when it is saved.” Every command is also open to an agent on the same Mac over a local API, and what an agent does shows in the window as it happens and can be undone there.

Tally costs $19 once, in US dollars, tax included. It is free for 7 days with no card, and once the trial has ended documents still open and can be edited, but saving, exporting and printing ask for a licence. One licence covers up to 3 of your Macs, every future update is included, and refunds are available within 30 days. There is no subscription and no account. Tally needs macOS 14 Sonoma or later.

Try Tally free for 7 days.

Then $19 once, for up to 3 of your Macs. No subscription and no account.

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Requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later.

Sources

Checked on 13 November 2026.