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I love G-Suite, and I use it daily for documents, sheets, and mail. I can do most things I need to do in sheets. That said, Sheets is no replacement for Excel
by redm 9y ago
I love G-Suite, and I use it daily for documents, sheets, and mail. I can do most things I need to do in sheets. That said, Sheets is no replacement for Excel nor is the performance on par for complex and dynamic sheets.
I suspect this is a general change over as a base solution for all employees. I'm sure there are still parts of Airbus that will continue using Excel, Word, etc.
IMHO this speaks to the fact that Office is overpowered (or bloated depending on how you look at it) for average employee needs; perhaps a cost savings issue too.
- spaceflunky 9y ago>That said, Sheets is no replacement for Excel nor is the performance on par for complex and dynamic sheets. I don't think anyone, not even Google, is saying Sheets is a pure replacement for Excel. That said, like 99% of people who use Excel could get by or do better with Sheets. Excel is crazy powerful, but not everyone needs complex i-banker programmer level power for running a simple program management sheet. And that's the issue GSuite is addressing. Excel is a one size fits all solution, like a shirt that can fit both an infant and a 1200lb gorilla.
- JonathonW 9y agoFrankly, Docs, Sheets, and Slides are nowhere even close to Word, Excel, and Powerpoint in terms of feature set and usability. Sheets especially, but even in Docs and Slides I'll run into things I can't do. Where the G-Suite apps really shine, though, is in collaboration. If I'm working by myself on something, I'll likely do it in Office just because that's where I'm most comfortable. But literally everything I write for work happens in G-Suite (mostly Docs, occasionally Slides), because Google makes simultaneous, real-time collaboration easy and seamless. That's something Office is only just starting to figure out (and too late).
- closeparen 9y agoCollaboration also goes beyond collaborating to produce the document. My company makes decisions in the comments of Google Doc proposals.
- DamnYuppie 9y agoOffice has a robust commenting and review feature set as well.
- closeparen 9y agoDoes it provide a function to merge the comments from tens of people’s individually annotated email attachments? If not, not really comparable.
- Someone1234 9y agoOffice 365 is though. - Microsoft Teams is a [bad] Slack clone. - Microsoft Planner is a [bad] Trello clone. - Outlook.com instead of the [bad] Outlook Desktop Application - Sharepoint online for a CRM - OneNote online for a shared scratchpad. The offline versions of Excel, Word, and Power Point have no online rivals but for collaboration Office 365 is one to watch. I'd even argue it has pulled ahead of Gsuite in the last year.
- someoneelse987 9y agoI agree with your critique. This is just a hunch but I don't think they are ahead: - Outlook.com must be one of the worst web apps there is. Compared to Gmail it's just plain awful. - Sharepoint is decidedly one of the worst pieces of software ever built, that is if you are a developer. If you are an editor/content manager then it is possible it's just fine.
- magnusdeus123 9y agoI use Outlook.com as my main email provider. And I'm managing to convince people to move off've Gmail onto it because of it's streamlined interface. What do you find wrong in it?
- someoneelse987 9y agoIt might just be a matter of preference but to me Outlook.com is an attempt to webify Outlook The Desktop Client, which was horrible to start with. But they made it worse than the desktop app. An example: while searching in your Outlook.com "client" it enters a new state, the search state. When you are done searching there is a left arrow in the navigation panel which you can click to go back to the "normal" state of things. Awkward. I'm a longtime Windows user, familiar with Microsoft user interfaces, but to me there is nothing to love about Outlook.com.
- bassman9000 9y agoIt's deliberately slow in Linux (applies to all Office products) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13932226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13932226 Issue still happens to me: easy to test switching agents.
- programbreeding 9y agoI haven't used G-Suite in years so I can't really compare it, but I use Excel online (via Office 365) to collaborate in real-time on documents with other employees all the time and it works great.
- sheetjs 9y agoFor most uses, Docs and Sheets "work". It is extremely easy to create a basic collaborative table or document. So long as you aren't stressing the sync features, everyone is on the same page. Where G-Suite suffers is in the random features that a small segment of power users swear by. The keyboard shortcuts aren't the same as what people learned in Word/Excel. There are many incompatibilities and rendering issues with the Excel and Word formats. But these concerns apply mostly to advanced users; for basic documents, letters, lists, and tables, G-Suite in 2018 works well
- zolthrowaway 9y agoTo add to this, WordML is super powerful. Modern .docx files are basically just big zip files. You can easily edit this and do some crazy things and MS Word will be pretty good about reflecting this in the editor. G-Docs can have some issues with modified WordML. You can do some of these things in open formats like .odt and G-Docs will be better about this. However, there are still problems with things like pagination. So overall, I think Docs is where you want to be unless you have some super niche use case. I don't have enough experience trying to do crazy things with Sheets to have an opinion on it vs Excel though.
- ams6110 9y agoYou're right about the feature set. But, Google's products are good enough for most users. The justification for all the bloat in MS Office was always "people only use 20% of the features but each person's 20% is different." Well Google actually did a pretty good job of identifying the features that most people use. I hardly ever open up MS Office anymore (it isn't even installed on my main work computer).
- chasedehan 9y agoMy home computers are all linux and GSuite is perfect for almost everything I do. I could see the issue with excel for many people in accounting/finance/etc, but sheets is more than enough for things I do as I don't do anything complex in a spreadsheet. At work I am forced to use windows and have to use Office for many tasks (including SharePoint - talk about a terrible product) and aren't allowed to use GSuite. If I had a choice, I would make the same decision as Airbus
- ebikelaw 9y ago"Docs ... nowhere even close to Word ... in terms of feature set ... really shine, though, is in collaboration." Contradiction. If your key feature is collaboration, GSuite is decades ahead of Office.
- throwaway84742 9y agoFor anything other than Excel, I actually vastly prefer Google stuff. Collaboration features and not having to worry about files outweigh the (small) downsides for me by quite a margin. Sheets is a bit of a laggard, but it’ll get there in another couple of years.
- erispoe 9y agoIt is true that Sheets isn't as powerful as Excel. But it's a good substitute for 99% of users. And for people dealing with complex models/large amount of data, they should probably use a proper programming language (Python, R) and version control.
- sct202 9y agoGoogle Sheet's limit of 400k cells sounds like a lot, that could be as few as 40k rows with 10 columns (probably lot of them would be dimensional). As someone who works with large amounts of data and business users, it sounds nice to say everyone should learn to code and query, but in practice the business users can get a lot done with a big spreadsheet with fewer errors and less training. I frequently hold classes to teach SQL, and even that is pretty tough for a lot of people to learn and do correctly.
- pratyushag2 9y agoIt’s 2m cells, not 400k.
- braderhart 9y agoHave you ever heard of LibreOffice Calc, which from my experience greatly outperforms Excel?
- michaelbuckbee 9y agoI think it might have been a Joel on Software story that talked about how when they did a review of what people actually used Excel for they found that a ridiculous number never went beyond "making lists of things". By that measure, I bet that Google Sheets is likely overpowered compared to most people's use. I try to keep this in mind when I see things like AirTable (and their recent big funding raise) - because it looks so "listy" and like something people would actually use [1]. Maybe the real differentiator is the ability to easily put checkboxes and pics in a row and much less dependent upon having advanced statistical functions, pivot tables, etc. 1 - https://youtu.be/r0lsyTaAuJE https://youtu.be/r0lsyTaAuJE
- bluGill 9y agoAs I recall the study went a little farther. The majority just used it for making lists. The rest used 10% of the features, but it was a different 10% for each person.
- fmavituna 9y agoI think overpowered is the right word for office. When used it doesn't feel bloated or cluttered, it's the pinnacle of Desktop Computing UX.
- dismal2 9y agoI think a lot of the more complex stuff excel has historically been used for has appropriately migrated to better suited analytics and data analysis platforms.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- wdr1 9y agoKeep in mind Microsoft had to some extent nerfed the non-Windows version of Excel, Word, & Powerpoint. The hope was to keep people on Windows, but as people started to shift away from Windows, it makes it much easier for them to jump from the sub-par version of MS Office to other products.
- discreditable 9y agoI agree that sheets is no excel, but it does almost everything I need, and a few things better. A few examples: - JavaScript as a scripting language. (It's no python but it's nicer than vbscript.) - Builtin regex functions (regexextract, regexmatch, regexreplace).
- fauigerzigerk 9y agoJavaScript is now the main language for writing Office add-ins: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/excel/excel-add-ins-overview https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/excel/ex...
- F2 9y agoDoes it work on mac yet?
- fauigerzigerk 9y agoThey say "Cross-platform support: Excel add-ins run in Office for Windows, Mac, iOS, and Office Online"
- discreditable 9y agoSeems like preview builds only at the moment. Reading the docs it also seems a lot more involved than the Google Docs workflow of Tools > Script Editor > write code.