3 ms·

Well everyone is using google docs/sheets/slides google slides support SVG btw https://gsuite.google.com/ https://gsuite.google.com/

Vaslo 7y ago
Not at any of the companies I have worked for or consulted for in the past 5 years. At least at the Fortune 500 level. I love using new tools but Google sheets is nowhere near Excel for more complex projects.
- ymolodtsov 7y ago
  That’s probably true, but in the most of the cases when it gets too complicataed for Google Sheets it shouldn’t be a spreadsheet at all. KPMG consultants sent us a lot of forms built in spreadsheets and that’s an abomination that should have been a simple webpage.
  - crispyambulance 7y ago
    I'm not going to defend KPMG, but spreadsheets are how things get done when you're in your cube and you just need it done. Spinning up "a webpage form" in a corporate environment has A LOT of overhead and complications. It can't be done on the fly. In many places, creating "a webpage" means putting up something on Sharepoint and possibly dealing with it's BOFH. That's a rabbit-hole I would not wish on my worst enemy!
  - Vaslo 7y ago
    You are definitely right, but there are practical issues. I have a very tight budget that never lets me invest in new tools. Our team has learned (well as much as you can learn) VBA to solve more complex issues in Excel because it's easy to hand a complicated spreadsheet over to a non technical colleague get feedback rather than have an application developed. I'd love to learn how to do that kind of stuff, believe me, but it's just not where we spend our budget dollars. There's also info security concerns, and yes, you can argue how secure is a spreadsheet, but a cool tool like Publisheet will never get approved because we'd be sending all our data server side.
- antigirl 7y ago
  Fair enough. I assumed everyone here was some sort of a dev, I haven’t installed office and refuse to install it. I just use the google services for any ancient documents clients send my way.
  - lazyasciiart 7y ago
    I'm a dev and I have Office installed. You have a lot of assumptions going on, apparently.
    - antigirl 7y ago
      Full office suite I hope. enjoy
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Consider that it's you who's missing out. Instead of thinking of MS Office as something non-tech-savvy people use, consider that Excel is the most widely successful environment for reactive programming and small-to-mid-scale data analysis in history. And despite its warts, it's good at what it does. Ironically, it's also a powerful case of democratization of programming - I can't think of any other piece of software that allowed so many non-tech users to write their own programs. This created tremendous productivity gains, by enabling bottom-up problem solving at scale. Sure, for anything you do in Excel there probably is a SaaS available. But with Excel, you get to own your data, Excel is much faster than that a web SaaS, works off-line, you don't have to pay for it extra, you don't have to get corporate to deal with procurement and negotiate terms, and everything works together - unlike SaaS, where number one principle is siloing data and minimizing interoperability. Google Sheets in particular is not a substitute of Excel for anything but most casual and undemanding of use cases. It's a heavy web app that barely works on cheap machines, chokes on complex data, and has nowhere near the UX/ergonomy of Excel. The seemingly popular view that you should use whatever fly-by-night SaaS that's currently popular for your use case instead of Excel sounds to me like asking why would you have a fridge in your house when there's a dinner delivery service, a pizza delivery service, a fruit delivery service and an alcohol delivery service all available. Why own a general-purpose tool when you can subscribe to specific services?

Vaslo 7y ago

Not at any of the companies I have worked for or consulted for in the past 5 years. At least at the Fortune 500 level. I love using new tools but Google sheets is nowhere near Excel for more complex projects.

ymolodtsov 7y ago
That’s probably true, but in the most of the cases when it gets too complicataed for Google Sheets it shouldn’t be a spreadsheet at all. KPMG consultants sent us a lot of forms built in spreadsheets and that’s an abomination that should have been a simple webpage.
- crispyambulance 7y ago
  I'm not going to defend KPMG, but spreadsheets are how things get done when you're in your cube and you just need it done. Spinning up "a webpage form" in a corporate environment has A LOT of overhead and complications. It can't be done on the fly. In many places, creating "a webpage" means putting up something on Sharepoint and possibly dealing with it's BOFH. That's a rabbit-hole I would not wish on my worst enemy!
- Vaslo 7y ago
  You are definitely right, but there are practical issues. I have a very tight budget that never lets me invest in new tools. Our team has learned (well as much as you can learn) VBA to solve more complex issues in Excel because it's easy to hand a complicated spreadsheet over to a non technical colleague get feedback rather than have an application developed. I'd love to learn how to do that kind of stuff, believe me, but it's just not where we spend our budget dollars. There's also info security concerns, and yes, you can argue how secure is a spreadsheet, but a cool tool like Publisheet will never get approved because we'd be sending all our data server side.
antigirl 7y ago
Fair enough. I assumed everyone here was some sort of a dev, I haven’t installed office and refuse to install it. I just use the google services for any ancient documents clients send my way.
- lazyasciiart 7y ago
  I'm a dev and I have Office installed. You have a lot of assumptions going on, apparently.
  - antigirl 7y ago
    Full office suite I hope. enjoy
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Consider that it's you who's missing out. Instead of thinking of MS Office as something non-tech-savvy people use, consider that Excel is the most widely successful environment for reactive programming and small-to-mid-scale data analysis in history. And despite its warts, it's good at what it does. Ironically, it's also a powerful case of democratization of programming - I can't think of any other piece of software that allowed so many non-tech users to write their own programs. This created tremendous productivity gains, by enabling bottom-up problem solving at scale. Sure, for anything you do in Excel there probably is a SaaS available. But with Excel, you get to own your data, Excel is much faster than that a web SaaS, works off-line, you don't have to pay for it extra, you don't have to get corporate to deal with procurement and negotiate terms, and everything works together - unlike SaaS, where number one principle is siloing data and minimizing interoperability. Google Sheets in particular is not a substitute of Excel for anything but most casual and undemanding of use cases. It's a heavy web app that barely works on cheap machines, chokes on complex data, and has nowhere near the UX/ergonomy of Excel. The seemingly popular view that you should use whatever fly-by-night SaaS that's currently popular for your use case instead of Excel sounds to me like asking why would you have a fridge in your house when there's a dinner delivery service, a pizza delivery service, a fruit delivery service and an alcohol delivery service all available. Why own a general-purpose tool when you can subscribe to specific services?