[skissane]

Outside of specific domains such as finance and accounting, most people don’t really need Excel, and will be served perfectly well by Google Sheets or whatever.

Indeed, I have hardly used Excel in years. I do use Google Sheets at work, where they are used for adhoc tracking by engineering, product management, project managers, etc.

Our son who is 11, he uses Google Sheets - and I know he has used Apple Numbers in the past too. I’m not sure if he even knows what Excel is.

[respondo2134]

I think people conflate Excel the product with workflows that can be solved with Excel. Lots of tools like sheets and even numbers can do the latter, but nothing since Lotus competed with the former.

So if you've never used Excel, you can probably get away with an alternative. But if you already know Excel, why would you add another product for some subset of use cases?

[dleeftink]

I'm a heavy Excel user, and I have yet to find a usecase that cannot be solved in Sheets. It has App Script after all, for whenever you run into a feature that isn't there. But even then, I've translated many Excel functions to native Sheets array_formula equivalents, and found the latter much more ergonomic.

[no_wizard]

Much of Excels dominance is due to its legacy pervasiveness in certain industries/ roles (notably finance or financial related but there’s strong bureaucratic use of it as well asan ad-hoc tracking tool for instance) and the fact that two generations of people grew up using it.

I’ve noticed over the years that younger generations are far more used to using Google Sheets since schools and universities have strong adoption of Google Workspace. As a result, I’ve seen less and less use cases that were once believed to be Excel only domains turn out not to be.

I’m not going to proclaim the death of Excel by any means but it’s not as ironclad of a leader position as it once was. There is however some increasingly niche cases where Excel can do things that Sheets can’t, or doesn’t do as well. One non obvious (for todays environment) use case being offline portability, Excel being a standalone program really helps here.

That said, they both suffer from one issue that’s the same, which is there is no ergonomic way to run business logic rules over the calculations easily (and some cases at all)

[proamdev123]

What do you mean by “run business logic rules over the calculations”? Genuine question.

Don’t most people embed business logic into their spreadsheet formulas?

Or is there something else you’re referring to?

[no_wizard]

It’s not uncommon for the sums of the spreadsheet to get fed into other systems or even spreadsheets.

There being validation around that can significantly reduce errors, such as checking totals against system values etc.

[danm]

Maybe it has changed, but last time I tried to use numbers it still didn’t support resolving circular references through iterative calculation.

[infoseek12]

There are lots of cases in businesses where there are integrations with other software that are difficult to port.

[mikeyouse]

Mostly in jest but the use case where Sheets falls over for me is copying formulas to the right…

[skissane]

> But if you already know Excel, why would you add another product for some subset of use cases?

I know Excel – I've been using Excel since before Sheets existed. First spreadsheet I ever used was Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS (I was just a kid at the time, so I was just mucking around with it, not using it in anger – but I remember watching my father use it in anger.)

At my work everyone gets Sheets, whereas you only get an Excel license if you specifically request one – and most people don't. So why would I use the product which most of my colleagues don't have, instead of the product everybody has?

Likewise on my personal laptop, I have an Excel license... and still I use Sheets for most things. Habit maybe? I've never used the web-based Excel, and I don't like having to deal with open another app.

The only time I ever use Excel nowadays is if I need to open some complex Excel spreadsheet that Sheets can't handle properly, or if I need to work on some Excel spreadsheet import/export function at work – both of which are "once in a blue moon" activities for me.

[alsetmusic]

I've only watched an Excel expert work their magic in person once and it was straight up sorcery. I'm glad not to need to learn it, but it was eye-opening seeing her rapidly make changes (with me not understanding what she was doing, sorta how non-experts likely perceive what we do when we help them with their personal devices) and come out with exactly what she wanted. Must have taken her about a minute and there were changes every several seconds until she was done.

Black magic in the hands of an experienced user.

[wrs]

In the case of Google Sheets, one reason is that collaborative editing in M365 Excel is absolutely awful. It’s slow, clunky, and more importantly loses data. If you have a shared spreadsheet with important data in it, it’s worth switching.

I’ve worked with a “prototype CRM” that was just a big Google Sheet. Basically a lead generation form would add a row to the sheet, and the sales team would edit cells to reflect the state of the sale. It grew to 3 million rows and still worked. Doing that in Excel is a laughable idea.

I’ve also been on a management team where compensation planning was done with ten managers editing a shared Excel sheet with just a few hundred rows. Somehow some rows got deleted and others got slightly scrambled during the process. It was a huge mess.