More columns before the scrolling starts
A spreadsheet is the one document that tells you immediately whether the screen is big enough: either the columns you need are on it, or they are not.
Nothing else on this site has so blunt a relationship with screen width. A page of text reflows, a photo scales, a map re-centres — a spreadsheet does none of that. The cells are the size the cells are, and a column that does not fit is a column you scroll to and then cannot compare against the one you came from. Phone spreadsheets are therefore mostly for reading one number, which is a fraction of what the format is for.
Comparison is the whole point of a grid, and comparison needs two things visible at once. This is the same argument as the two-pane mailbox, except that a spreadsheet makes it arithmetical: every extra centimetre is a specific number of additional columns, and you can count them.
The order runs from apps that are a grid first to apps where the grid is one feature among several.
- 1
Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Corporation
The listing is about reviewing files and running analysis away from a desk, with templates for budgets, accounting and financial analysis. Those are wide documents by construction — a budget is months across — and reviewing one on a phone has meant accepting that most of it is off-screen.
- 2
Google Sheets
Google LLC
Formatting, sorting, formulas, find and replace, charts, and several people editing the same sheet at once. Collaborative editing is the case that punishes a narrow screen hardest: following someone else's cursor is impossible when their cell and yours are never on the screen together.
- 3
Numbers: Make Spreadsheets
Apple Distribution International
Starts from designed templates and supports several people editing one sheet at the same time. Templates are laid out by someone who assumed a certain width, and a layout that was designed rather than generated is one that degrades visibly when it does not fit.
- 4
Airtable
Formagrid Inc.
Describes itself as a way to build connected apps from checklists, collections and contact tables, with templates to start from. A table used as a database is wide by nature — one row is a record with many fields — so the width limit arrives on the first screen rather than the fifth.
- 5
Quip - Docs, Chat, Sheets
Quip, Inc.
Puts documents, slides, spreadsheets and chat in one app, with the chat integrated for collaboration. The chat is a second column that already wants to exist, which is the two-pane argument again with a conversation in the right-hand pane.
- 6
MobiOffice・Word Docs・Excel・PDF
MobiSystems, Inc.
An office suite covering documents, spreadsheets, presentations and PDFs with compatibility across formats. Breadth rather than depth in any one of them, so the gain is the general one: a sheet from somewhere else, opened nearer the width it was built at.
The selection and the order are ours. Each entry is written from that app’s own App Store listing, linked beside it, and this page from Apple's iPhone Duo product page. Drafted with AI assistance and checked back against those sources before publishing; the disclosure page explains how. The iPhone Duo has been on sale since 23 October 2026 and nothing here has been seen running on one, so what each entry says about the fold is an argument rather than a test.