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Comment by mslate | Hacker News Reader

From an actuary's perspective: is Google Sheets ever entertained as an Excel alternative?

No, for many reasons. Workbook calculation performance, advanced, complicated spreadsheet incompatibility, worse UI/keyboard shortcuts, slow UI, different language than VBA for custom functions (It isn't necessarily worse, but it's the same thing as trying to convince a department to switch from language X to Y including rewriting every application that's written in X. Also, every person you've ever hired was familiar with X, and has no experience with Y.)

R/Python/SAS etc. are a much more compelling alternative to Excel than Google Sheets (to say nothing of the actuarial modeling software packages that are used already for more rigorous/complicated problems).

If an insurance company decided to move all of their MS Office users to Google Docs/Sheets etc, my money is on the actuarial department paying for Excel out of their budget without a moment's hesitation.

It's been a couple years since I've used it, and I didn't feel it was a comparable alternative. It's decent for about 80% of spreadsheet users, but the keyboard shortcuts were lacking and it was missing some functions that I rely on.

For keyboard shortcuts, most Excel power users don't use the mouse, so while it sound trivial, it's really hard to feel productive when you have to hunt around for the right button to click.

From an enterprise perspective, Excel is so entrenched it would be a 5-10 year effort to port existing spreadsheets to sheets. Practically speaking, most companies wouldn't see the benefit.

> From an enterprise perspective, Excel is so entrenched it would be a 5-10 year effort to port existing spreadsheets to sheets. Practically speaking, most companies wouldn't see the benefit.

And at the end of the day, it would have worse performance than Excel both in calculation speed and _much_ worse UI. One of the reasons Excel is so much better than Sheets is speed. Insurance companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on actuaries. Even if Excel cost them $500/year/user, it would be easily worth it for actuarial departments.

The hundreds of thousands of dollars a year that insurance companies spend on actuaries is the real reason that no one will ever come off excel. The maths is not very complicated but the lack of source control and testing means each bugfix or added feature introduces another bug to fix next week or feature to add the week after.

Used GSuite (Google Workspace?): It's fine, it is improving but lack of shortcuts even for basic tasks (I can change the font on Word with just a keyboard, try that with Docs without a mouse). Dealbreaker is the 5 million cell (not row nor column) limit, which is even lower than Microsoft's old limits (more than 15 million cells, which was increased in 2007 to you-have-a-serious-problem-if-you-somehow-fill-this-limit cells).

Not to mention that if you're using Power Query, Excel's 1 million row limit doesn't apply in the workbook queries either.

Alt+/ is the magical shortcut that makes this easy, you can simply search a font name and hit enter.

Not an actuary - but I think this crosses domains: the lack of comprehensive shortcuts makes Google Sheets DOA (dead on arrival) for my uses.

Uploading propertiary data to a cloud is a big no.

Companies are more worried about this than they probably should be.

The average enterprise network is nothing like as secure as people behave like it is.

Where do you think your email is hosted? With few exceptions I'd expect its provided by a cloud provider these days.

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