Instead one only needs to worry that one can’t get one’s work done.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a time when I wanted to use a spreadsheet for anything moderately complicated where gsheets was up to snuff. That’s not to say that excel doesn’t have problems or does things easily, but it doesn’t lead to quite the same level of frustration and hair-pulling, and indeed it’s usually possible to achieve things in excel when they are impossible in gsheets. Indeed that app even struggles at the ‘easy’ task of being able to fiddle around with table formatting. Its sole advantage is the collaboration. It can be used as a place to dump small amounts of varied tabular data to share but not really for calculation or analysis.

As far as competing anecdata, I found gsheets absolutely much better for joining together multiple sheets of data. The lookups are so much less touchy simply because "it's all in the cloud" (as long as you have permissions).

With Excel you have to ensure the file is there, and readable, not tampered with, etc.

This allowed us to create better multi-workbook "apps" that have a bit more modularity - you could even embed sheets into a webpage as a view-only client.

In the end, Excel is good for us only for interoperability with external groups.

I have. Especially before Excel released their dynamic array features. I love the sort function in gsheets. Combined with filters it allowed me to automate things that relied on vba in Excel.

Google Sheets has more useful formulas than Excel. For example query(), but also all the array formulas that they include.

Wait, seriously? I find the exact opposite! I would love it if Gsheets were as performant as Excel with large tables but scrolling gets bogged way down. If you add too many formulas, Gsheets will get stuck recalculating formulas endlessly. I love Gsheets because of the ability to link between documents easily, their comment system, filter views, and native regex… but performance?? It’s terrible!

Large sheets? Google Sheets has a much lower cell and row limit compared to Excel

I assume they mean performance wise. Excel could have larger hard limits but handle complex sheets worse.

Google Sheets is an unusable dumpster fire. I just tried to import a 3 million row CSV yesterday and it wasn't able to do it. INDEX/MATCH don't even work properly! Basically unusable unless you need it for scheduling parties or whatever people use Airtable for.

Have you considered using a different tool for the job? Processing 3 millions rows of CVS sounds like a task that is more fitting for a small script than Excel/Google Sheet.

Google Sheet excels at many other tasks, but it's not a replacement for specialized tool (and it should not).

Yes of course, I originally generated the file using Pandas but it's always a pain in the ass to remember the magical incantations to make pretty 2D graphs that aren't fugly. That being said, I have a knack for making great 3D graphs that are awesome! In any case, it's hard when my employer doesn't just gimme that juicy Excel subscription because cost-cutting and efficiencies.

In the end I put on my robe and wizard hat and used matplotlib. (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Seaborn in Python to make matplotlib pretty by default + plot some uncommon graphs. `%matplotlib widget` to make matplotlib interactive. Plotly in Python if you want decent graphs that are also interactive by default.

Observable if you want an interactive, hosted visualization notebook (and all their libraries are open source, except their UI). Plotly, Observable's Plot library, or D3 if you don't mind JavaScript. Can bundle libraries + data + visualization into a single html file and deliver that as an interactive report; once you have the base template down it's decently ergonomic.

Plotly is my current default when I'm working with Jupyter, though. Sane defaults are nice.

I'd love to learn if I'm doing something wrong, but Sheets has terrible performance compared to Excel in my experience.

Not just sheet sizes, but Sheets feels much slower and has a vastly weaker toolset. Just the fact that the browser takes precedence for keyboard commands from the web app makes the usability suffer massively.

And controversial as this may be, JavaScript.

performant JavaScript exists apparently - I was shocked to learn that there are some new DeFi projects that are executing DEX arb bots and write all their code in TypeScript (lmao).

It will be extremely funny to see how Google does this whole "rewrite all our office products to use <canvas> instead of the DOM" project over the next couple quarters... he says, laughing, shaking his head at the wasted effort... Caesar wept for there were no more worlds to conquer

Newer versions of Excel have native JavaScript support https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/referenc...