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Personally, I strongly prefer working with GSheets to Excel. It handles large sheets better and you never worry about the app crashing and taking your precious

by ttul 5y ago

Personally, I strongly prefer working with GSheets to Excel. It handles large sheets better and you never worry about the app crashing and taking your precious work along with it.

arthurcolle 5y ago
Large sheets? Google Sheets has a much lower cell and row limit compared to Excel
- rtkwe 5y ago
  I assume they mean performance wise. Excel could have larger hard limits but handle complex sheets worse.
  - arthurcolle 5y ago
    Google Sheets is an unusable dumpster fire. I just tried to import a 3 million row CSV yesterday and it wasn't able to do it. INDEX/MATCH don't even work properly! Basically unusable unless you need it for scheduling parties or whatever people use Airtable for.
    - thanhhaimai 5y ago
      Have you considered using a different tool for the job? Processing 3 millions rows of CVS sounds like a task that is more fitting for a small script than Excel/Google Sheet. Google Sheet excels at many other tasks, but it's not a replacement for specialized tool (and it should not).
      - arthurcolle 5y ago
        Yes of course, I originally generated the file using Pandas but it's always a pain in the ass to remember the magical incantations to make pretty 2D graphs that aren't fugly. That being said, I have a knack for making great 3D graphs that are awesome! In any case, it's hard when my employer doesn't just gimme that juicy Excel subscription because cost-cutting and efficiencies. In the end I put on my robe and wizard hat and used matplotlib. (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
        popinman322 5y ago
        Seaborn in Python to make matplotlib pretty by default + plot some uncommon graphs. `%matplotlib widget` to make matplotlib interactive. Plotly in Python if you want decent graphs that are also interactive by default. Observable if you want an interactive, hosted visualization notebook (and all their libraries are open source, except their UI). Plotly, Observable's Plot library, or D3 if you don't mind JavaScript. Can bundle libraries + data + visualization into a single html file and deliver that as an interactive report; once you have the base template down it's decently ergonomic. Plotly is my current default when I'm working with Jupyter, though. Sane defaults are nice.
  - elefanten 5y ago
    I'd love to learn if I'm doing something wrong, but Sheets has terrible performance compared to Excel in my experience. Not just sheet sizes, but Sheets feels much slower and has a vastly weaker toolset. Just the fact that the browser takes precedence for keyboard commands from the web app makes the usability suffer massively.
dan-robertson 5y ago
Instead one only needs to worry that one can’t get one’s work done. I don’t think I’ve ever had a time when I wanted to use a spreadsheet for anything moderately complicated where gsheets was up to snuff. That’s not to say that excel doesn’t have problems or does things easily, but it doesn’t lead to quite the same level of frustration and hair-pulling, and indeed it’s usually possible to achieve things in excel when they are impossible in gsheets. Indeed that app even struggles at the ‘easy’ task of being able to fiddle around with table formatting. Its sole advantage is the collaboration. It can be used as a place to dump small amounts of varied tabular data to share but not really for calculation or analysis.
- r00fus 5y ago
  As far as competing anecdata, I found gsheets absolutely much better for joining together multiple sheets of data. The lookups are so much less touchy simply because "it's all in the cloud" (as long as you have permissions). With Excel you have to ensure the file is there, and readable, not tampered with, etc. This allowed us to create better multi-workbook "apps" that have a bit more modularity - you could even embed sheets into a webpage as a view-only client. In the end, Excel is good for us only for interoperability with external groups.
- LasEspuelas 5y ago
  I have. Especially before Excel released their dynamic array features. I love the sort function in gsheets. Combined with filters it allowed me to automate things that relied on vba in Excel.
- benhurmarcel 5y ago
  Google Sheets has more useful formulas than Excel. For example query(), but also all the array formulas that they include.
arcturus17 5y ago
And controversial as this may be, JavaScript.
- arthurcolle 5y ago
  performant JavaScript exists apparently - I was shocked to learn that there are some new DeFi projects that are executing DEX arb bots and write all their code in TypeScript (lmao). It will be extremely funny to see how Google does this whole "rewrite all our office products to use <canvas> instead of the DOM" project over the next couple quarters... he says, laughing, shaking his head at the wasted effort... Caesar wept for there were no more worlds to conquer
- sheetjs 5y ago
  Newer versions of Excel have native JavaScript support https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/reference/overview/excel-add-ins-reference-overview https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/referenc...
plaidfuji 5y ago
Wait, seriously? I find the exact opposite! I would love it if Gsheets were as performant as Excel with large tables but scrolling gets bogged way down. If you add too many formulas, Gsheets will get stuck recalculating formulas endlessly. I love Gsheets because of the ability to link between documents easily, their comment system, filter views, and native regex… but performance?? It’s terrible!

by ttul 5y ago

Personally, I strongly prefer working with GSheets to Excel. It handles large sheets better and you never worry about the app crashing and taking your precious work along with it.

arthurcolle 5y ago

Large sheets? Google Sheets has a much lower cell and row limit compared to Excel

rtkwe 5y ago
I assume they mean performance wise. Excel could have larger hard limits but handle complex sheets worse.
- arthurcolle 5y ago
  Google Sheets is an unusable dumpster fire. I just tried to import a 3 million row CSV yesterday and it wasn't able to do it. INDEX/MATCH don't even work properly! Basically unusable unless you need it for scheduling parties or whatever people use Airtable for.
  - thanhhaimai 5y ago
    Have you considered using a different tool for the job? Processing 3 millions rows of CVS sounds like a task that is more fitting for a small script than Excel/Google Sheet. Google Sheet excels at many other tasks, but it's not a replacement for specialized tool (and it should not).
    - arthurcolle 5y ago
      Yes of course, I originally generated the file using Pandas but it's always a pain in the ass to remember the magical incantations to make pretty 2D graphs that aren't fugly. That being said, I have a knack for making great 3D graphs that are awesome! In any case, it's hard when my employer doesn't just gimme that juicy Excel subscription because cost-cutting and efficiencies. In the end I put on my robe and wizard hat and used matplotlib. (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
      - popinman322 5y ago
        Seaborn in Python to make matplotlib pretty by default + plot some uncommon graphs. `%matplotlib widget` to make matplotlib interactive. Plotly in Python if you want decent graphs that are also interactive by default. Observable if you want an interactive, hosted visualization notebook (and all their libraries are open source, except their UI). Plotly, Observable's Plot library, or D3 if you don't mind JavaScript. Can bundle libraries + data + visualization into a single html file and deliver that as an interactive report; once you have the base template down it's decently ergonomic. Plotly is my current default when I'm working with Jupyter, though. Sane defaults are nice.
- elefanten 5y ago
  I'd love to learn if I'm doing something wrong, but Sheets has terrible performance compared to Excel in my experience. Not just sheet sizes, but Sheets feels much slower and has a vastly weaker toolset. Just the fact that the browser takes precedence for keyboard commands from the web app makes the usability suffer massively.

dan-robertson 5y ago

Instead one only needs to worry that one can’t get one’s work done. I don’t think I’ve ever had a time when I wanted to use a spreadsheet for anything moderately complicated where gsheets was up to snuff. That’s not to say that excel doesn’t have problems or does things easily, but it doesn’t lead to quite the same level of frustration and hair-pulling, and indeed it’s usually possible to achieve things in excel when they are impossible in gsheets. Indeed that app even struggles at the ‘easy’ task of being able to fiddle around with table formatting. Its sole advantage is the collaboration. It can be used as a place to dump small amounts of varied tabular data to share but not really for calculation or analysis.

r00fus 5y ago
As far as competing anecdata, I found gsheets absolutely much better for joining together multiple sheets of data. The lookups are so much less touchy simply because "it's all in the cloud" (as long as you have permissions). With Excel you have to ensure the file is there, and readable, not tampered with, etc. This allowed us to create better multi-workbook "apps" that have a bit more modularity - you could even embed sheets into a webpage as a view-only client. In the end, Excel is good for us only for interoperability with external groups.
LasEspuelas 5y ago
I have. Especially before Excel released their dynamic array features. I love the sort function in gsheets. Combined with filters it allowed me to automate things that relied on vba in Excel.
benhurmarcel 5y ago
Google Sheets has more useful formulas than Excel. For example query(), but also all the array formulas that they include.

arcturus17 5y ago

And controversial as this may be, JavaScript.

arthurcolle 5y ago
performant JavaScript exists apparently - I was shocked to learn that there are some new DeFi projects that are executing DEX arb bots and write all their code in TypeScript (lmao). It will be extremely funny to see how Google does this whole "rewrite all our office products to use <canvas> instead of the DOM" project over the next couple quarters... he says, laughing, shaking his head at the wasted effort... Caesar wept for there were no more worlds to conquer
sheetjs 5y ago
Newer versions of Excel have native JavaScript support https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/reference/overview/excel-add-ins-reference-overview https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/referenc...

plaidfuji 5y ago

Wait, seriously? I find the exact opposite! I would love it if Gsheets were as performant as Excel with large tables but scrolling gets bogged way down. If you add too many formulas, Gsheets will get stuck recalculating formulas endlessly. I love Gsheets because of the ability to link between documents easily, their comment system, filter views, and native regex… but performance?? It’s terrible!