[bkuehl]

I don't understand this sentiment at all. I have to deal with Outlook at work and it is hot garbage. I can't believe this competes with a web application from 2004. Yes, I get desktop Excel but I have never had to use any feature in it I couldn't get in Sheets (I use sheets a lot outside of work). Trust me you have it good. We do not even have Office 365, so our 'sharing' options are SharePoint. I would love to have Gmail for work.

[tablespoon]

> Yes, I get desktop Excel but I have never had to use any feature in it I couldn't get in Sheets (I use sheets a lot outside of work).

If that's the case, there's a pretty decent chance that you just have relatively novice spreadsheet skills/needs, so a basic tool will satisfy you (e.g. you're not so much evaluating your tools, but yourself). I'm not saying that's actually the case, just that "it works for me" gives very little information about the software you're using.

[moeris]

> "it works for me" gives very little information about the software you're using.

I don't think so. It says that the software satisfies the basic requirements of its target audience, and gives a hint as to who that audience is.

On the other hand, if you receive the opinion of some self-proclaimed expert, I think you're receiving less useful information. Experts are typically a small percentage of the userbase, and among experts there can be vastly different opinions depending on their specialty. Ask an Android dev to review vim, and an operating systems dev, and you'll get wildly different responses. If you ask a generalist software developer, you'll likely get less noise.

[tablespoon]

>>> Yes, I get desktop Excel but I have never had to use any feature in it I couldn't get in Sheets (I use sheets a lot outside of work).

>> "it works for me" gives very little information about the software you're using.

> I don't think so. It says that the software satisfies the basic requirements of its target audience, and gives a hint as to who that audience is.

No, not really. What's the "target audience"? The GGP certainly doesn't say, and wrote a comparison that is meaningless unless you're already very familiar with the software (transforming it into a statement about the particular user), and perhaps misleading if you don't. I could say the exact same thing as him, except about MS Paint, e.g.

Yes, I get desktop Photoshop but I have never had to use any feature in it I couldn't get in MS Paint (I use MS Paint a lot outside of work).

Does that say MS Paint is a powerful program, or that I'm an amateur user? You can't really say unless you already know the programs, since I didn't say anything about the kinds of graphics work I actually do.

> Ask an Android dev to review vim, and an operating systems dev, and you'll get wildly different responses. If you ask a generalist software developer, you'll likely get less noise.

No, you won't get less noise, you'll just get different noise.

[bkuehl]

There are some cases like accounting departments that may definitely need the extra features from Excel. I guess I weigh the collaboration features Google provides over the extra features Excel provides. Google is still playing catch-up with Excel and probably always will be But Microsoft is a decade behind Google in basic mail management.

[_jal]

You don't even have to get that fancy in Excel before Google can't keep up.

But there's an even more basic problem - trading documents with Excel users. Trying to round-trip anything more than a simple data-only Excel doc through Google Docs is folly, especially if you keep passing a document back and forth.

In case it wasn't obvious, I have to use both. I have multiple external vendors where emailing Excel docs back and forth is how you do business. Internally, we're Google Docs, except where we're not, mainly anything that touches Finance or Legal. But the Windows IT folks also use a lot of Excel. And, you get the idea.

In conclusion, the idea that anyone has a "solution" that is supposed to actually solve "sharing" is hilarious.

[assttoasstmgr]

Obviously, he's never worked for Contoso.

[mc32]

Power Queries is sorely missing in Sheets. There is no competition. The one area Google does better is in real-time collaboration. Also finding where a "file" exists in order to manage it is lacking in GWS.

[m-p-3]

There's the QUERY formula in Google Sheets that I actually like when I want to do some SQL-like queries and I don't believe it exists in Excel (yet)

https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093343

[snazz]

I'd argue that Gmail (user interface, features, and performance) is the best part of Google Workspace and competes very favorably with Outlook. Excel, on the other hand, is a league above Google Sheets when it comes to performance and advanced features, although Sheets has a few unique things too. They both have their strengths and I'm happy to have the competition to make both better.

[bkuehl]

I won't argue that Excel is great. It is by far Microsoft's best product. It is an amazing accomplishment. Google has been able to do 85% of it and also added some great collaboration features. Yeah, it's not as good and probably never will be. No one will ever be on par with Excel. But the rest of Office is pretty bad.

[nradov]

It's hard to quantify exactly but Google sheets has nowhere near 85% of the features of MS Excel. Maybe 40%? There's tremendous depth to Excel which most users never touch, but which some of us absolutely need.

The latest release of Excel seems to be fully caught up to Sheets on collaboration features. We can save a file on Teams and then have multiple users editing simultaneously through a mix of desktop, mobile, and web clients it works really well.

[saghm]

Interesting, I realized after reading your comment that I had mentally parsed the above comment as meaning "85% of users have every feature they need" (and presumably some non-zero but decreasing percentage of the features the others need), but looking back I see that's not how it's phrased. It does make me think more about how "40% of features" versus "85% of features" should be interpreted though. Even assuming that there's agreement on what counts as a single feature versus multiple related but separate features (which isn't a guarantee), should every feature be weighted equally? I could see it being more reasonable to weight features by how necessary they are or by how much they're used; is the ability to do something very basic that almost everyone needs like summing a range the same "percent" as something more esoteric (I'm not a spreadsheet power user myself so I'm not sure what would be a good example here, but maybe calculating a regression of some obscure function class)?

[droopyEyelids]

What you're describing is so far outside my experience I wonder how we could be using the same application (teams, Sharepoint, excel)

[stjohnswarts]

google sheets (and microsoft excel online) aren't even close to the capabilities and speed of navigation of desktop excel. Like it is night and day if you are a heavy heavy user of excel. I'll admit some of what I've built up over the years would likely be better done in some combination like python and a database, but that's another topic for another day.

[ipaddr]

Libre office can replace sheets.