[techfoolery]

That seems more like an entrenched opinion that you've continually looked to reaffirm instead of opening your perspective.

First, serious work & powerpoint? Really? Yeah in an enterprise organization that's largely stuck doing what they've been doing because it's worked - sure, but that's not a technology issue, it's a culture issue.

For example, Google Sheets covers 80-90% of the use cases for Excel. But that's not what you should be comparing. A lot of what folks use spreadsheets for to do complicated calculations, have built lengthy, stitched together macros to automate processes, etc. would be much better in many cases to consider a completely alternate approach.

i.e a data warehouse, hey use a service like BigQuery that requires minimal adminstration and requires users to really only have SQL knowledge.

In order to effectively work across a large organization across different functions, product lines, etc., you have to remove every point of friction that prevents collaboration, etc. Desktop Office is great for individual work, but in today's dynamics, it really seems like you put a ceiling on productivity by sticking to it.

[manigandham]

Business users are not going to learn SQL. They're not going to move all their data into the cloud, setup access, manage resources and spend money to run queries that take a few seconds on their laptop. They're not going to use 20 different services to break out scratch work, analysis, charting, and BI from what runs in a single portable file that they can manage and backup and extend in unlimited ways from meeting to meeting.

There are billion dollar businesses that run on Excel, and many workers in all kinds of industries live in it all day because nothing else comes close. Those macros and automations are what empower them to get things done and drive business forward instead of worrying about the "right way" to do something.

This perspective that they're all naive and should use better tools just fails to understand how people actually work, and explains why G-Suite as it is today will never beat Excel.

[pjmlp]

And Excel is getting cool big data features and Tableau like capabilities.

[king_magic]

> continually looked to reaffirm

Huh? I don't recall continually posting about how G Suite sucks. Pretty sure this is the first time?

> Desktop Office is great for individual work, but in today's dynamics, it really seems like you put a ceiling on productivity by sticking to it.

Desktop Office is basically O365 today, and it's pretty much constant collaboration where I work. Not sure how that doesn't meet today's dynamics?

[jeffFrom18F]

I used Excel for several years, mostly doing development work for financial services companies. I now work at a small/medium-size tech company that uses Google Sheets. Sheets is fine for most of the things we need to do, but our needs are modest. Sheets' overall functionality pales in comparison to Excel, and it often feels laggy even on a good network.

The finance companies I mention above also had data warehouses, but that's a completely different use case and not what Excel is used for. It would not work as a replacement even if everyone knew SQL.

[aliswe]

An example would be a PowerPoint presentation showing a diagram linked to an Excel file using SQL Server as a datasource.

Dunno if something similar can't be done in Googles office suite as well though.

[spydum]

It can, google data studio more or less is this