I bought tables, because Excel and Numbers are huge programs and I wanted to quickly open excel files and do basic things with it. It does this job.

Here is my experience:
Pro:
- opens most Excel files without problems
- opens up fast
- most handling is rather intuitive
- OSX native app
- good price

Con:
- has a strange own format that creates big files. These files take longer to save than exporting into Excel, but they open up quicker. I'd rather have no format change at command+s.
- Does not stick to all OSX hot keys. The most annoying is that command+< does not swap between windows but zooms your window. HEY! I bought tables, because I wanted to be fully in the OSX world!!
- _very_ slow scrolling when holding down mouse button on the up/down arrows. Also some other a actions are extremely slow (some are quick, though). Almost impossible to work on bigger files.
- is less user friendly than I expected from an OSX app. Sometime this is understandable, because tables needs to mimic how (badly) Excel works, but sometimes I'd expect more clever/slick/direct/customizable ways of improving productivity. For example, most of the every day functions are (like in excel) hidden in the menus. They can not be linked to hot keys and they can not be put into the GUI as a button. In general, the menus feel like Excel and not like OSX. We can do better than that!

Conclusion:
- Tables is the right way to go for simple every day spreadsheet tasks.
- For complex uses, you'll need Numbers and for full compatibility you'll need Excel or maybe OpenOffice.
- I think tables is the best choice for me and it is worth the money, but I couldn't say that I love it, because it is still away from the very high standards other OSX apps set.
I think that only very few things need to be enhanced in terms of usability/customizability/speed to make tables a true winner.