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Well first off Excel isn't all that powerful a spreadsheet. It is unclear what you consider so special about it. Excel is a good spread sheet. But it isn't top of the line things like: http://www.quantrix.com/ are far better for many types of power users. As far as Excel for Mac, with the exceptions of VBA I doubt there is much of importance you use that's missing.

I'd disagree. For people who do document composition there are tons of document composition systems. http://www.quantrix.com/ is certainly up market from Excel. There are higher end project management software... I'll agree there is no integrated suite that is up market, but many of those components cost more than the entire Office suite.

They aren't remotely feature complete. For example with spreadsheets compare: http://www.quantrix.com/ to Excel. That being said, you are kidding but the last decade has been a decade of rapid advance. Look at the tie ins with Dynamics that exist today, that sort of integrated BI/ERP was very rough around the edges even 5 years ago.

If you want a great spreadsheet: http://www.quantrix.com/

Whoa, pricey. They could probably rule the world if they released an ultra-simple free version and a somewhat more featured cheap version.

If you want a great spreadsheet: http://www.quantrix.com/
If you want to beef up the programming language but are fine with Excel: http://www.wolfram.com/products/applications/excel_link/

If you are talking non commercial: Siag (suggested above) is cool: http://siag.nu/index.shtml
This hasn't seen much activity in a decade but Haxcel: http://www.johanmalmstrom.se/haxcel/ is Haskell in a spreadsheet.

The small business that I work for (that just finally, after years, saw decent growth in 2012) just switched to Quantrix, and let me tell you, that's an amazing piece of sotware. Not sure if it was OP's answer, but the what if scenarios are actually decent, not fluff, and another good feature was the fact that it wasnt =AVERAGE() or some other excel BS. (It almost replaced my job -- seriously, i'm not that important)

If you want a great spreadsheet: http://www.quantrix.com/
If you want to beef up the programming language but are fine with Excel: http://www.wolfram.com/products/applications/excel_link/

If you are talking non commercial: Siag (suggested above) is cool: http://siag.nu/index.shtml
This hasn't seen much activity in a decade but Haxcel: http://www.johanmalmstrom.se/haxcel/ is Haskell in a spreadsheet.

For generate slides I'd say Keynote beats PowerPoint.

How so? I ask because while I do have Office 2011 on my mac I'm thinking of switching to iWork for retina display support since Office isn't getting a 2013 update.

For use a spreadsheet http://www.quantrix.com/ beats Excel rather handily.

At $1500 for the Pro version and $3000 for Pro Plus I'm sure it does, I doubt the difference would matter enough to most Excel users though.

For generate slides I'd say Keynote beats PowerPoint. For use a spreadsheet http://www.quantrix.com/ beats Excel rather handily. For Word Processing I use about over a dozen word processors probably during the course of a decade depending on the type of use. But you are missing a lot of advantages of products like Framemaker for structure, Google Docs for simultaneous editing, Pages for easy layout, ....

http://www.quantrix.com/

If its similar to this then its very interesting, indeed.

You mean this one ? It's no longer owned by Sun.

No, but there are other products that do finance better. http://www.quantrix.com/

A current application with similar UI and capabilities is Quantrix.

Supposedly it is written for an OpenStep-compatible framework, which seems likely since the MacOS download is significantly smaller.

I don't know. I have been playing around with the demo for Quantrix Modeler and I think I like it a lot more than Excel.

Spreadsheet errors are hard to fix and errors are easily replicated because the "logic" is not transparent -- the formulas are contained within the cell. Only the creator of the spreadsheet has a prayer of understanding the intent of the document, not to mention the function of each cell. While the spreadsheet might be ubiquitous, serious number crunchers need a better application. There are a lot of enterprise financial modeling apps, but they don't help desktop users. A company in Portland, Maine has developed something called Quantrix Modeler. It's multidimensional, formulas are contained outside the cell, and use natural language. There's a 30-day trial version at http://www.quantrix.com./

Check out something like Quantrix http://www.quantrix.com/ a reincarnation of Lotus Improv

Check out Quantrix: http://www.quantrix.com/

Are you sure Claris licensed Informix Wingz? Because AppSoft definitely did (I worked on it there) and the code was a nightmare. We joked after AppSoft went under that it was the application that had killed 3 companies.

BTW, Quantrix (lighthouse design's version of Improv) has been rewritten in Java and is available for OS-X.

http://www.quantrix.com/ (I think, from memory)

Lighthouse Design wrote Quantrix, a Lotus Improv clone. After Sun bought Lighthouse and the trademark expired, Pete Murray rewrote it in Java. It's available here: http://www.quantrix.com/

I just hope they make it like Quantrix or FlexiSheet and less like Excel.

Maybe it is related to Quantrix.

Friend: http://www.quantrix.com/

Disclaimer: I'm not a shill--not even a customer, in fact. But I'm a friend of the author, and was a contributor to Quantrix's NeXTstep based predecessor.