Where the G-Suite apps really shine, though, is in collaboration. If I'm working by myself on something, I'll likely do it in Office just because that's where I'm most comfortable. But literally everything I write for work happens in G-Suite (mostly Docs, occasionally Slides), because Google makes simultaneous, real-time collaboration easy and seamless. That's something Office is only just starting to figure out (and too late).
- Microsoft Teams is a [bad] Slack clone.
- Microsoft Planner is a [bad] Trello clone.
- Outlook.com instead of the [bad] Outlook Desktop Application
- Sharepoint online for a CRM
- OneNote online for a shared scratchpad.
The offline versions of Excel, Word, and Power Point have no online rivals but for collaboration Office 365 is one to watch. I'd even argue it has pulled ahead of Gsuite in the last year.
- Outlook.com must be one of the worst web apps there is. Compared to Gmail it's just plain awful.
- Sharepoint is decidedly one of the worst pieces of software ever built, that is if you are a developer. If you are an editor/content manager then it is possible it's just fine.
An example: while searching in your Outlook.com "client" it enters a new state, the search state. When you are done searching there is a left arrow in the navigation panel which you can click to go back to the "normal" state of things. Awkward.
I'm a longtime Windows user, familiar with Microsoft user interfaces, but to me there is nothing to love about Outlook.com.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13932226
Issue still happens to me: easy to test switching agents.
Outlook likes to duplicate things. They don't even have smart folder support in their web UI.
Microsoft's problem with O365 is that they don't want to re-invent anything. Google has the opposite problem in that they re-invent chat a few times a year.
If you look at Teams or Outlook groups, they're just recycling features that exist already. The Office apps are getting better in the sense that they are getting closer to feature parity between the various versions of office -- but they are doing so in a way that will break enterprise IT.
1. Ability to reference a specific person in a comment (e.g. +DamnYuppie please add your thing here).
2. Ability to add/update TOC for a document
3. Comments being owned by whoever wrote them, so others cannot accidentally edit the text of the comment.
4. Ability to notified of and reply to comments by email.
5. Ability to organise documents within my own folder, without creating second copies. (In GSuite, a document is a single thing, even if different people want to organise their own folders differently.)
I also find the UI is hard to get used to. It's different from GSuite, which is to be expected, but it's also different from the desktop version of Word.
Of course I went through a phase of finding that GSuite lacked features that I liked in Excel, but the ease with which you can use Google Docs/Sheets/Slides across devices, and the super-slick display and interaction of the commenting and suggesting features, more than make up for those.
Google Sheets was a much better experience for collaboration.
At work I am forced to use windows and have to use Office for many tasks (including SharePoint - talk about a terrible product) and aren't allowed to use GSuite. If I had a choice, I would make the same decision as Airbus
Where G-Suite suffers is in the random features that a small segment of power users swear by. The keyboard shortcuts aren't the same as what people learned in Word/Excel. There are many incompatibilities and rendering issues with the Excel and Word formats. But these concerns apply mostly to advanced users; for basic documents, letters, lists, and tables, G-Suite in 2018 works well
You can do some of these things in open formats like .odt and G-Docs will be better about this. However, there are still problems with things like pagination.
So overall, I think Docs is where you want to be unless you have some super niche use case. I don't have enough experience trying to do crazy things with Sheets to have an opinion on it vs Excel though.
Contradiction. If your key feature is collaboration, GSuite is decades ahead of Office.
By that measure, I bet that Google Sheets is likely overpowered compared to most people's use.
I try to keep this in mind when I see things like AirTable (and their recent big funding raise) - because it looks so "listy" and like something people would actually use [1].
Maybe the real differentiator is the ability to easily put checkboxes and pics in a row and much less dependent upon having advanced statistical functions, pivot tables, etc.
I don't think anyone, not even Google, is saying Sheets is a pure replacement for Excel. That said, like 99% of people who use Excel could get by or do better with Sheets.
Excel is crazy powerful, but not everyone needs complex i-banker programmer level power for running a simple program management sheet. And that's the issue GSuite is addressing. Excel is a one size fits all solution, like a shirt that can fit both an infant and a 1200lb gorilla.
- JavaScript as a scripting language. (It's no python but it's nicer than vbscript.)
- Builtin regex functions (regexextract, regexmatch, regexreplace).
The hope was to keep people on Windows, but as people started to shift away from Windows, it makes it much easier for them to jump from the sub-par version of MS Office to other products.
I suspect this is a general change over as a base solution for all employees. I'm sure there are still parts of Airbus that will continue using Excel, Word, etc.
IMHO this speaks to the fact that Office is overpowered (or bloated depending on how you look at it) for average employee needs; perhaps a cost savings issue too.