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Comment by adjkant | Hacker News Reader

Sheets will fit a lot of excel use cases for those not doing serious heavy lifting with it.

FWIW, I'm a software engineer and our IT department actually let people opt out of Microsoft office if they weren't using it to save money, and encouraging people to use Google Docs/Sheets (as most do anyways). I'm guessing a good deal of software engineers did that but there are plenty of non-engineers that probably also did outside of finance / some sales people.

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I am a big fan of sheets, but it is not Excel. Some of the functions are missing after all these years, not to mention charts and pivots.

I think Google gave up on trying to compete with excel on features.

Sheets has had pivots for years. It's become very rare that Sheets doesn't have a feature I want, whereas it's become more common that I'm in Excel and wish I could use Sheets' query function.

Pivots exist, but aren’t nearly as functional.

Sheets has charts and pivot tables. It definitely lacks some features of excel, but it also has some nice new additions that I love so far - e.g. Showing the return value of a formula while still editing.

Sorry, I didn’t mean that sheets doesn’t have charts. I meant that the charts in sheets are missing substantial features that have been in excel for years.

The overwhelming majority of people who double click the Excel icon would be equally well served by sheets or localc. It's fine if you're an analyst and are more productive with Excel, but if you're the rest of us, it doesn't matter what spreadsheet app you use. For most of us, a spreadsheet is a spreadsheet and don't need anything more complicated than sum().

In most companies, it's silly to have Office installed by default for all employees. If you need it, fine, put in a request and we'll get it done.

(please note there are a few things I'm NOT saying: 1) localc or sheets are as good as Excel for all users. 2) companies should save money by never paying for Excel, even if an employee wants to use Excel. 3) all companies should follow the rule of thumb outlined in my second paragraph.)

i think you are severely underestimating the amount of people whose entire job is excel

You’re right for creating. But many people read spreadsheets that are created by someone who needs those functions. If only 1% of spreadsheets use that function, the entire organization needs it. Training users how to double click icons is surprisingly hard. Trying to train them how to open some spreadsheets in Sheets and some Excel is a support nightmare.

Maybe I could see an argument for localc, but sheets is actually pretty costly at $50-150/year.

I think it’s fine for non-business people to just use the free sheets, but an org would have to not care about excel to use sheets for everyone.

With 365, it’s sort of a no-brainer as while it’s not as good as sheets for accessibility, if I’m going to pay $100/year/user then it’s easier to plan for 365, than sheets, I think.

> Maybe I could see an argument for localc, but sheets is actually pretty costly at $50-150/year.

Where are you getting that from? I see Enterprise GSuite at $25 a user (max) and that includes mail and drive. The cost of sheets here is probably $10 or less.

It does seem like the cost is in line, but if you're already paying for Gmail/Drive or other Gsuite things then saving the office 365 cost absolutely helps and Sheets is essentially a no-cost add-on.

https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html https://products.office.com/en-us/compare-all-microsoft-offi...

Meh, you should probably be using either python or an RDBMS. Most non trivial applications of excel come from a lack of IS knowledge IMO. It’s easy to do but it makes everyone around you less happy.

I disagree as both a python and rdbms user. Excel is great for millions of one off use cases by users who don’t know how to program and don’t know sql and/or have access to rdbms infrastructure. And I think that’s ok.

If I want to create a reproducible data process then I’ll build it in python and maybe some data share or database.

But tons of work can be done in excel that isn’t worth the cost to build in something else.

I don’t include Macros, if I’m programming in Excel, I should probably do that in something that is better designed.

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