Hacker News Reader

Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

Google Sheets is wonderful in countless ways. It’s so handy to have multiplayer spreadsheets. But anyone who thinks it’s a drop-in replacement for Excel is a fool.

View on HN

Office 365 provides multiplayer spreadsheets, in addition to a great desktop client, and the ability to work in-browser if you prefer.

Cool I should give that a try. But a decade ago that didn’t exist and for undergrad and grad school Sheets was amazing. I almost did my dissertation in Docs but decided to use Pages instead (which was simpler than Word but a few times lacked what I needed… if I could do it again I’d of used Word)

A decade ago is a long time in tech. Which to be blunt: Should never color your opinions about technology today. Sheets was really neat a decade ago, but is just basic competency today.

Indeed! The lesson is to revisit things on occasion!

Sheets has had almost no updates for the last 10 years after getting to its current level of viability. I'm reminded of this 7 year old talk (You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky) where he goes over a bunch of great Excel features that still aren't in Google Sheets today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c

It’s hard to add features to something like Sheets or Excel. Large and finicky users are hard to please

And yet, somehow, some amazing features have been added to Excel recently. Dynamic array formulas and lambda functions have taken my Excel use to the next level. Let alone new standard functions (e.g. sort, filter, misc. text-manipulation functions).

Do they have QUERY like Sheets yet?

It's the typical way with Google products...

When the original dev team moves on to other projects, the new guys just make minor tweaks and no major product changes happen. Big new feature releases do things like "we moved this tool from the edit menu to the file menu".

Excel has had ability to edit same document by multiple people at the same time for at least 20 years. And is in process of discontinuing that feature.

I strongly prefer Office to Docs except for multi-user edits. Office on the web absolutely sucks and is miserable to use while a team of people is editing away IME.

This has been my experience as well. Google Docs have a premium collaboration experience.

You can be using your Excel windows client to edit a sheet, while someone else is editing on a web browser, while someone else is editing on an iPhone, while someone else is editing on an Android phone, while someone else is editing on a Mac.

Sheets is cool, but, Excel and Word and Office365 are streets ahead of Workspace from an enterprise point of view. I've been a staunchly non-microsoft guy for years. When I was younger I was the guy writing it at Micro$oft or more likely Micro$shit. These days, managing multiple companies, some of which use Office and some which use Workspace I cringe when I need to deal with issues on the Workspace side. There are some things which Google does better. Generally APIs for the Office365 products are not as good as the APIs for the equivalent Sheets/Docs/etc product. I've done some fun/funky things with using Google sheets as an adhoc database. Put a "job" in a row in a Sheets sheet and a few minutes later something does your task and you can see the result in that sheet. Super easy to do with Sheets API, I've tried for years to get similar CRUD to work on Excel API and always hit roadblocks.

Office365 APIs for user management and groups and all the "AzureAD" stuff is absolutely top-notch.

Anything Google Cloud or cloud related, google wins hands down.

So many choices. No one product to rule them all.

O365 multiuser Excel is awful. It’s pretty trivial for someone to fubar the XLS in such a way that it’s completely unusable.

Excel is probably one of the finest pieces of software devised. But not that part.

I've been using Google Sheets for years and always figured it was better than Excel.

For whatever reason, I recently got Excel and... yeah - way better.

Right?

I mean, like I said, a lot of the complaints I have aren't really the fault of Workspaces.

We actually use the multiuser functionality of Sheets a lot but I still run into constant issues. And the fact a huge chunk of this crap does /not/ play nice with /multi-user local workstations/, in 2022, drives me bonkers.

Yeah the app script integration makes it even better.

It needs more resources not less, especially for the inbuilt fetching APIs, like Google finance

Reply on news.ycombinator.com