[antonycourtney]

I don't think I ever claimed it was better than Excel, which is targeted at different set of users and use cases. That said, here are some reasons why some users might prefer Tad to Excel: It's free and MIT licensed with the sources on github. It's available for Linux, Windows and Mac. It works on any tabular data source. The UI for creating a pivot table is clear and intuitive and efficient (just a few clicks); many users find Excel's pivot table interface difficult and confusing. The underlying typed data model is a better fit for many data sets. And finally, it is many times faster than Excel for loading and working with large CSV files: My large test data set takes 12 sec to load in Tad vs 40 sec. for Excel.

[ZenoArrow]

"It works on any tabular data source."

Just on that point, Excel allows you to define the field delimiter on import of text files and handles a ton of different formats out of the box, so I doubt this is a point where Tad is better than Excel (though Tad does look promising as a tool to quickly check data files).

[jonaf]

Perhaps the better question is, how is this better than Google Spreadsheets? Most of your reasons still apply, but I believe google docs handles large spreadsheets pretty well (after an initial loading phase).

[unclesaamm]

Google Sheets isn't open sourced and MIT licensed is one big difference

[alexpetralia]

I think these are all very legitimate reasons, thanks for the info!