[HillRat]

PowerPoint collaboration is … interesting, and gets more interesting as people mix web, Windows, and Mac apps simultaneously, and as the number of people on a single deck increases (which seems like an edge case, but more than once I’ve had up to thirty-odd people in a deck editing and observing right up to a proposal submission deadline). Versions are prone to race conditions, data gets lost, and each version of PP imposes its own weird idiosyncrasies on the deck. Even so, it’s still the best of the slideware builders; if I didn’t have Office I’d probably fall back to LibreOffice; then Indesign; then Keynote; then paper and pencil; and then consider cuneiform or cave paintings. After that, I’d probably consider Slides, but only if the client rejected a proposal to present through the collective medium of slam poetry and interpretive dance.

[Closi]

As someone that heavily uses PowerPoint collaboration - I would say that it's got a lot better and keeps getting better. It's not perfect, but it's much better than it was two years ago (and the number of conflicts keep coming down).

But yes - much better than Google Docs, which has some frankly bizarre limitations each time I try to use it.

Excel collaboration on the other hand... good luck! (I suspect an application of the complexity of Excel just won't be able to be easily made collaborative... Google Sheets manages it, however it is a much simpler app that can handle less data and has much less functionality).