Re:How a New York Times Software Engineer Ended Up Covering ...
by cosmie on Thursday September 13, 2018 @11:57AM
(#17979601)
Sheets isn't consistently the better option, but it does shine for specific use cases. The three main reasons I'll reach for Sheets is:
- Heavy text munging. The builtin regex functions have no equivalent in Excel without dropping down into custom
- Quick and dirty data pulls and third party integrations. Especially any that involve Google services (since the auth process is less painful). I used to use both VBA and App Script pretty extensively, and could switch between the two without much issue. But I use neither as frequently as I used to, and it's significantly easier to ramp back up and ship when I use App Script rather than VBA. Excel supports Javascript now, but are only usable if you can ensure it's going to be used exclusively in newer versions of Excel.
- Sheets I create for others (especially shared by multiple users) that I know I'll need to maintain and support later on. The access controls, change auditing & revert capabilities, and standardized/centralized execution environment all remove entire classes of support needs and the associated cognitive overhead when triaging issues.
That said, there are certain times I prefer to use Excel.
- Pivot charts are amazing and have no equivalent in Sheets.
- Pivot tables are far more powerful than their Sheets counterpart.
- PowerBI is fantastic (except for the lack of Excel for Mac support. Which can still view the results of PowerBI, but can't do any editing).
- When connecting to internal data sources. Getting access to data sources, for business teams, is a royal pain in the ass. Legitimately so, since it's rare for a business team to have a resource with a technical enough skillset to truly be trusted with direct access to anything. Getting access that's reachable outside of the intranet (where App Script would run) is virtually impossible.
- Heavy text munging. The builtin regex functions have no equivalent in Excel without dropping down into custom
- Quick and dirty data pulls and third party integrations. Especially any that involve Google services (since the auth process is less painful). I used to use both VBA and App Script pretty extensively, and could switch between the two without much issue. But I use neither as frequently as I used to, and it's significantly easier to ramp back up and ship when I use App Script rather than VBA. Excel supports Javascript now, but are only usable if you can ensure it's going to be used exclusively in newer versions of Excel.
- Sheets I create for others (especially shared by multiple users) that I know I'll need to maintain and support later on. The access controls, change auditing & revert capabilities, and standardized/centralized execution environment all remove entire classes of support needs and the associated cognitive overhead when triaging issues.
That said, there are certain times I prefer to use Excel.
- Pivot charts are amazing and have no equivalent in Sheets.
- Pivot tables are far more powerful than their Sheets counterpart.
- PowerBI is fantastic (except for the lack of Excel for Mac support. Which can still view the results of PowerBI, but can't do any editing).
- When connecting to internal data sources. Getting access to data sources, for business teams, is a royal pain in the ass. Legitimately so, since it's rare for a business team to have a resource with a technical enough skillset to truly be trusted with direct access to anything. Getting access that's reachable outside of the intranet (where App Script would run) is virtually impossible.