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Comment by foxes | Hacker News Reader

In contrast to your anecdote, I have never had issues with Google docs. It has always just worked, reasonably clean interface. I'm not sure what elaborate styling you need, but it seems serviceable for when you need a basic document which I imagine is most peoples use case. Also the collaboration is actually very useful. The same reason I use overleaf as an interface for a lot of my LaTeX projects. I can quickly share and get updates, they just have to open their browser instead of download pdf > open it in their pdf viewer > make comments > send it back etc. The web interface is great for people that do not use git etc.

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Google Docs cannot even add custom styles. And if you open word file with custom styles, it just… removes all of them.

G Docs is fine but very basic. Great for sharing and collaboration, not great for exercising precise control over the document.

I don’t know what precise control you need over the document in the use case served by Google docs.

That’s exactly the problem; Google Docs’ use case is only “share a basic document and collaborate on the words.”

It’s not capable of creating precise or maintainable documents (e.g. no styles as others have mentioned), which is a very common need that it’s adjacent enough to that lots of people use it for and then it fails.

What is a style? Are you trying to create a poster or do some graphic design? Some weird xml style sheet thing? Yes it’s not for that, but then also doing that in libre office or word also sounds horrible and unmaintainable.

To define a custom style in a word processing context means to define "a group of settings that I can apply at will to parts of the text".

That is, I should be able to define a "Code block" style that should appear in the same dropdown where google docs lets you select heading levels. When I select that "Code block" style, the app should format the selected bit of text according to the syte's definition. For instance: use a monospace typeface, apply some margins to this paragraph and paint a gray background on it.

Likewise, I should be able to update the style definition and all code blocks should update accordingly.

This is very basic functionality that has existed in word processors since... forever. Large and/or more complex documents are simply much much more painful to maintain/evolve without this feature.

To add on to your well laid out points, many companies have "house styles" embedded into their templates that allow a consistent look and feel. GDocs lack of support for these makes it a non-starter.

I feel the same about GDocs. And GSheets is just insane. I have mixed feelings about Google but they knock it out of the park with their drive tools.

gsheets is hilariously slow compared to excel, once you start getting into larger files.

Gsheets offers some formulas I found quite useful and would be a pain to replicate in Excel.

Excel has lambdas now.

Excel formulas have a horrible 1970:ish syntax. Reminds me of BASIC programming. But typically I get the job done, sometimes after several awkward intermediate steps.

I wasn't aware that Google has a different one. I have never used more than simple sums and differences in Google sheets. Can you give an example where Google offers better, incompatible functionality?

For example, QUERY [1], SPLIT [2] and ARRAYFORMULA [3] are the ones that comes to mind. To be fair MS Excel can do arrayformulas, but I prefer GSheet's syntax. Last time I tried Excel, TRANSPOSE wasn't a thing it but it seems to be there now.

[1]: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093343

[2]: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3094136

[3]: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093275

excel is fully programmable with vba.

Google docs is also reportedly terrible for working with sizeable documents.

gsheets lets me collaborate with others in real-time and share with others very easily. When you think about “performance”, you have to consider more than just the immediate steps taken while in the application. If you think about the entire end-to-end experience, gdrive is so much faster and seamless.

office 365 offers "co-authoring" and easy sharing as well. You're talking about something excel already has.

But working on large files is ridiculously painful. It's just not as as good as a native app. I don't want to give up my ability to work on large files in a performant fashion, which I do all the time, in exchange for collaboration support I do occasionally but a worse overall experience and frustrating lag compared to a native application.

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