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Comment by danielvaughn | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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