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I’ll never understand how people can be close to effective with Google Docs. It’s fine as a replacement for Word (I guess? I’m not much of a Word user). But Ex
by addicted 5y ago
I’ll never understand how people can be close to effective with Google Docs.
It’s fine as a replacement for Word (I guess? I’m not much of a Word user). But Excel is so far ahead. And the ergonomics of working in a real application vs a web app is a significant difference.
- hodgesrm 5y agoIt's the sharing. In distributed teams that one feature makes up for a multitude of sins.
- LightG 5y agoMaybe for replacing Word, not Excel. Google Sheets is handy for basic tasks among small/large groups. Get even a tiny bit "sophisticated" and it's all over.
- DarkmSparks 5y agoI mostly replaced excel with libreoffice sheets where possible. I actually prefer writer in all circumstances. For everything else similar (e.g. shared complex excel docs with tons of VB) I use MS office on a mac mini and my main desktop is a fc33 build with an RTX3070 and AMD5900X
- LightG 5y agoThanks, good to see some options I can dabble with.
- hodgesrm 5y agoWe have a 100% remote company. We run our business on Google Sheets. It's entirely sufficient for our purposes which include cloud cost modeling (we do a lot of that) as well as cash flow management and financial projections. I'm an Excel fan as well but in our case it simply would not work due to the fact the team is spread across so many locations.
- LightG 5y agoI will give Sheets another go soon to see how it's progressed but I've always run up against a deal breaker before. And I say "soon" because I thought I'd have a Sunday-morning nosey around right now after reading your comment (I was inspired) ... and ... : ** Google Docs encountered an error. Please try reloading this page, or coming back to it in a few minutes. To learn more about the Google Docs editors, please visit our help centre. We're sorry for the inconvenience. - The Google Docs Team ** ... It went away 10 minutes later, but I can't have that in the middle of a working day.
- LightG 5y agoAnd then ... : Sorry, the file you have requested does not exist. Make sure that you have the correct URL and that the file exists. Get stuff done with Google Drive Apps in Google Drive make it easy to create, store and share online documents, spreadsheets, presentations and more. Learn more at drive.google.com/start/apps. .... The above is actually an error produced by me just trying to create a new blank page. Sorry, I won't be going near Sheets for anything I care about. I'll try again in a year. The above annoyed the hell out of me.
- hodgesrm 5y agoI've never seen this bug, but it would definitely alter my opinion as well. :/
- haswell 5y agoMicrosoft has invested heavily in realtime collaboration, and while I think Google still has the edge there, O365's collaboration features are reasonably good in 2021. I realize the parent question was more focused on how people find success with Google Docs, but if that success is primarily due to collaboration, and collaboration in O365 is now decent, I wonder if some of the justifications for using Google Docs still hold up.
- scoopertrooper 5y agoI've had some pretty terrible experiences trying to to collaboratively edit word documents in Office 365. You get all sorts of corruption with people bumping into one another. Big groups, small groups, it doesn't matter, at some point you'll see some malarkey.
- haswell 5y agoI’m with you. I’ve had some pretty terrible experiences with this in the past as well. I haven’t had many issues over the last 6-12 months, though, and as far as I can tell, they continue to improve. Don’t get me wrong - I’m not a fan of MS products and as I said, I think Google still has the edge in collaboration. But they’ve come far, and it wasn’t that long ago that those collaboration features were unusable or non-existent.
- hodgesrm 5y agoSame here. Office 365 collaboration is cumbersome and awful. (YMMV, this is my experience.)
- klodolph 5y agoGoogle Docs is missing some basic features that Word had in the 1990s, like the ability to define your own styles.
- grogenaut 5y agoI'm currently in a doc where I just set all of the main styles (title, headline 1, etc) to my own styles. Or do you mean something else? Just change some words, then select headline 1 -> update from here
- chipotle_coyote 5y agoYou are redefining the existing styles, not defining your own styles.
- grogenaut 5y agoAah, ok. Well apparently I've never needed to get that fancy with word.
- chipotle_coyote 5y agoThe semi-joke with Word is that we all know everyone only uses about 20% of its features, but it turns out nobody agrees on what that 20% is. :)
- grogenaut 5y agoJupyter Notebooks is my Excel, so that's how.
- ubermonkey 5y agoIt's a different thing, though, isn't it? I do a big charity bike ride every year, and track my donors in Excel (largely because the initial dump of donation data came from the org in that format). I try to be smart about my appeals, and I rapidly ran into limitations on pulling certain sets of email addresses out of Excel easily/simply/etc., and my next-step turned out to be Jupyter. It's GREAT for that, and I can still keep my data in Excel as a source and just query against it. But I can't imagine trying to do the whole thing in Jupyter.
- grogenaut 5y agoI do project organization in excel, which is possibly close to what you're thinking, but I really don't like doing formula editing in excel when I can just do it in python. It's personal preference tho. Excel is an amazing piece of software esp for a power gui. But so is Python. For my work I'm either dealing with about 1k rows max... or I'm dealing with millions of rows or more, things that break excel. Or multi terra, stuff that likes a cluster.
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago> It’s fine as a replacement for Word (I guess? I’m not much of a Word user). Google Docs is to Word what Google Sheets is to Excel in terms of functionality. As long as what you're doing is simple, it's fine, and if what you're doing requires collaboration, it's great. But when you want to do something remotely complex, Docs and Sheets largely get their asses handed to them by Apple's free iWork apps, let alone Microsoft Office.
- exhilaration 5y agoI mean, you're right, no one at Goldman Sachs is using Google sheets unless it's to get everyone's lunch orders together. (Hell, I bet Google's finance team uses Excel.) But most of us don't work at Goldman and don't do anything remotely complex. I would guess that 90% of Excel users fall into this category and that's who Sheets is for.
- jslove 5y agoAnd the rest of the people should be using pandas, a database, or data visualization tools (tableau) instead.
- ubermonkey 5y agoWhy?
- CRConrad 5y agoBecause being dependent on Salesforce is so much better than being dependent on any other big proprietary corporation?
- throwaway2037 5y agoI don't know any huge, non-tech companies (insurance, commercial banks, investment banks, heavy industry, auto manufs, etc.) that use the Google ecosystem (office & mail). I'm sure all of them use Microsoft Exchange (slowly moving to MSFT cloud), instead of GMail. If someone knows any good exceptions, please share!
- kernelsanderz 5y agoAs someone who has recently had to switch from Google Sheets to Office365 the experience has been very poor. Even things like keyboard shortcuts are very inconsistent with the web version of Excel. And if someone is editing the document while people are editing the web version watch out, random things can happen. Example: How do you enter a cell to edit in Excel? On the desktop (I'm a mac user), it's ctrl-u (yep - ctrl). On the web I can't find any shortcut. I have to double click the cell like an animal. Example: How do you select all the text inside a cell. On the mac it's cmd-a as you'd expect, on the web it's ctrl-a. Sigh. The seamless collaboration of Google's apps is a joy, though as you've indicated, you give up a lot of features and power.
- p_l 5y agoThing is, with O365, there's always the desktop app.
- herbst 5y agoHow many of us do actually excel? As someone who never was familiar with the windows or UI world of things I usually solve my excel issues with code.
- ubermonkey 5y agoI do, and it IS powerful, but lots of the things that it's really good at in a finance context I tend to solve with SQL. But that's because I am -- or used to be -- a programmer. If you've never programmed, "just use SQL" is super daunting. OTOH, Excel gives you access to that kind of data query power without writing code, and the people who are good at it can do pretty amazing things with it. It's a different way of solving that problem. It's a powerful tool, and it's a well-built one (again, it pains me to say, bc I grew up hating MSFT). If you're on a platform that has access to a native app, exploring it can actually be fun.
- herbst 5y agoMy point is it's a niche product. It's something only a few people actually need and use and something that has plenty of 'more powerful' alternatives. It's not something most people would choose their operating system for.
- ubermonkey 5y agoI'm not sure I consider interoperable spreadsheets a "niche" product at all. It's a key consideration for huge chunks of the Fortune 500, for example. Just because the average HN poster doesn't interact with these people from their tech silo doesn't mean they don't exist. And yeah, there's a real history in computing of spreadsheets literally driving platform adoption.