The fine folks at ArtCraft, who previously brought you PhotoCraft and a growing family of de facto standard app clones, have reverse-engineered yet another corporate staple: GridCraft, a spreadsheet app designed to mimic Microsoft Excel. Because nothing says "open-source revolution" like recreating the world's most beloved grid of cells.
ArtCraft's collection is being hailed as an important step forward for open source and Linux, largely because these apps address long-standing roadblocks to user adoption. With WordCraft, DeckCraft, and PDFCraft now in the lineup, the excuses for not switching to Linux are dwindling. Time will tell, but these apps seem like a big step forward for Linux and open-source generally.
Now, before you dismiss GridCraft as a rebranded Excel running on some interpretation or abstraction layer, know this: like its siblings, GridCraft runs natively on Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS, and Windows. And because it's written in Rust, it's blazingly fast. The reviewer opened a spreadsheet with 1,000 rows and the app didn't so much as hiccup - a sentence that will resonate with anyone who's watched Excel ponder a pivot table like it's solving cold fusion.
GridCraft also works on more platforms than Excel and is free, which are obvious perks. It's released under an open license, so anyone can download the code, edit it, rebuild it, and redistribute it - a level of freedom that would make Microsoft's legal team reach for the antacids.
Feature-wise, you get a standard spreadsheet workflow, native XLSX compatibility, more than 500 calculation functions, charts and pivot tables, agent-native automation, and copy-on-write workbooks with instant undo snapshots, incremental recalculation, and a virtualized grid. In other words, everything you'd expect from a modern spreadsheet, minus the subscription fee and the nagging feeling that your data is being used to train something.
Testing on Linux, MacOS, and Windows revealed identical, fast performance across the board. If you're accustomed to MS Excel's draggy performance, GridCraft's instant launch and snappy operation will be a pleasant surprise. Click the launcher, and it opens immediately - no spinning wheel of existential dread.
Once open, you can create a spreadsheet from scratch. There are three sample templates (Household Budget, Quarterly Sales Dashboard, and Gradebook), but the template selection is admittedly lacking. You can always create your own or download some from the official MS Template download site - because irony is free, too.
One area where GridCraft diverges from Excel is templates: the reviewer couldn't find a way to save a spreadsheet as an .xltx file. Hopefully, the developers will add a more robust template feature. In the meantime, you can save a spreadsheet as a CSV into a templates folder you create. It's a hack, but it works - like most things in open source.
GridCraft is not a 1:1 drop-in replacement for Excel, but it's pretty close. It offers the same features, the same UI (minus the MS branding), and does the same calculations. The reviewer opened an Excel spreadsheet with a pivot table, and everything was in place and functioning properly - a small miracle in itself.
That said, because your spreadsheet could be the one that encounters problems, always make a copy of your work and use the copy on GridCraft. No matter how well it performs, don't go into the app thinking it's production-ready. In other words, trust, but verify - and back up.
Spreadsheets can be the heart of your business or project, so always keep a copy of your data. That advice applies to any application, really - especially the ones that promise to replace Excel.
Will the reviewer use GridCraft for spreadsheets? You bet. In fact, they've begun adopting all of the ArtCraft apps to replace similar tools. The one exception is FilmCraft, only because they've invested so much time and money into DaVinci Resolve, and FilmCraft doesn't quite have the color tools and node trees they're used to. Fair enough - some habits are hard to break, even for open-source enthusiasts.