A lightweight spreadsheet program. mtCellEdit is a lightweight spreadsheet program that I created from scratch. It is a small, no frills program which is designed to handle simple day to day spreadsheet tasks. I have put the most important facilities I want into a small customized program which means I can avoid the problems of larger programs such as slow operating speeds and overcomplicated user interfaces.

The program has 100 undo steps, and allows a file to contain any number of sheets. All cell referencing is done via the R1C1 notation which I find more efficient and less error prone than the more commonly used A1 notation.

The core of the program is a shared C library which can be used by any C program to read, write and manipulate spreadsheets.

The default file format mtCellEdit uses is portable and transparent as it is a ZIP file containing TSV text files. I deliberately designed it this way so that data can be extracted and read by any modern spreadsheet program on any operating system without requiring mtCellEdit. Over the years I have been frustrated by binary and XML formats that make data only accessible via a single program (or by me wasting time manually converting each file, or by me writing a file format conversion program). This format ensures that my data never becomes stranded, and can be manipulated by whichever tool I choose for a particular job (i.e. spreadsheet programs, text editors, command line tools, etc).

In the source and binary packages I have included some example programs that use the core engine to demonstrate how useful spreadsheets can be to general purpose programs. These packages also contain a few library dependencies that are required.

mtCellEdit has currently only been tested on GNU/Linux systems, but it is pure C language so porting it to other systems should be fairly trivial.

Like all software, mtCellEdit is a tool, and in order to use it efficiently you will need to study what it does and how it works by reading the handbook.