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I have witnessed two different trials of Google Apps for "regular" office workers. In my experience, the number of Excel users satisfied with Google's offering

• na85 11y ago
  Change aversion.
  • veidr 11y ago
    Nah, it wasn't just that, although certainly that was one component of it. Excel has developed into a mini-platform of sorts, where users do all kinds of things with it. Time cards, expense reports, order sheets, office floorpans, generic lists, by-hand Gantt charts, etc etc. And other tools -- even similar ones that are supposed to be 'Excel-compatible' like Apple Pages or Google Sheets -- don't really work with many Excel documents 'in the wild'. The real killer feature of Excel is Excel-compatibility. That's the only reason I personally use Excel -- because, for various reasons mostly outside of my control, I sometimes have to use documents created in Excel. E.g., my employer's vacation day reporting form is created in Excel by HR, and hell no Google Sheets doesn't work with it. (Actually, even the Mac version of Excel also doesn't work with it -- I fire up VMWare whenever I need to fill one out.) Nothing other than Excel really works perfectly with Excel documents. I think that was the biggest reason for the failure of the two Google Apps trials I witnessed. (But there is also the fact that Excel was massively more feature-packed, reliable, and performant than Google Sheets -- which I think is still the case today. I personally use it because I enjoy the ubiquitous access cloudy-cloud-cloud nature of it, but I don't think that wins for many users, especially those who really mainly just use it at their desk at work anyway.)