Heck, I regularly manage to run into people that have managed to convince themselves that nobody actually runs Linux servers or that Java is the only programming language that has any traction...
The truth is that real-world tech adoption is actually extremely heterogeneous and we would all do well to remind ourselves of that from time to time.
It’s fine as a replacement for Word (I guess? I’m not much of a Word user). But Excel is so far ahead. And the ergonomics of working in a real application vs a web app is a significant difference.
Google Docs is to Word what Google Sheets is to Excel in terms of functionality. As long as what you're doing is simple, it's fine, and if what you're doing requires collaboration, it's great. But when you want to do something remotely complex, Docs and Sheets largely get their asses handed to them by Apple's free iWork apps, let alone Microsoft Office.
- Regex support in find & replace and regexextract(). - FX rates as a formula instead of as a data type. IIRC Excel requires 2 columns to display a FX rate (one to specify the pair, one to print the number); Google Sheets specifies the pair inside the formula.
I think the big transition at PWC was 5 years or so ago I think, but to this day every document I get from them is Excel / Word. Despite how much work went into those accounts - these are not complex spreadsheets either!
Example: How do you enter a cell to edit in Excel? On the desktop (I'm a mac user), it's ctrl-u (yep - ctrl). On the web I can't find any shortcut. I have to double click the cell like an animal.
Example: How do you select all the text inside a cell. On the mac it's cmd-a as you'd expect, on the web it's ctrl-a. Sigh.
The seamless collaboration of Google's apps is a joy, though as you've indicated, you give up a lot of features and power.
I'm an Excel fan as well but in our case it simply would not work due to the fact the team is spread across so many locations.
** Google Docs encountered an error. Please try reloading this page, or coming back to it in a few minutes.
To learn more about the Google Docs editors, please visit our help centre.
We're sorry for the inconvenience. - The Google Docs Team **
... It went away 10 minutes later, but I can't have that in the middle of a working day.
Sorry, the file you have requested does not exist.
Make sure that you have the correct URL and that the file exists.
Get stuff done with Google Drive
Apps in Google Drive make it easy to create, store and share online documents, spreadsheets, presentations and more.
Learn more at drive.google.com/start/apps.
....
The above is actually an error produced by me just trying to create a new blank page.
Sorry, I won't be going near Sheets for anything I care about. I'll try again in a year. The above annoyed the hell out of me.
I realize the parent question was more focused on how people find success with Google Docs, but if that success is primarily due to collaboration, and collaboration in O365 is now decent, I wonder if some of the justifications for using Google Docs still hold up.
I haven’t had many issues over the last 6-12 months, though, and as far as I can tell, they continue to improve.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m not a fan of MS products and as I said, I think Google still has the edge in collaboration. But they’ve come far, and it wasn’t that long ago that those collaboration features were unusable or non-existent.
I do a big charity bike ride every year, and track my donors in Excel (largely because the initial dump of donation data came from the org in that format).
I try to be smart about my appeals, and I rapidly ran into limitations on pulling certain sets of email addresses out of Excel easily/simply/etc., and my next-step turned out to be Jupyter. It's GREAT for that, and I can still keep my data in Excel as a source and just query against it.
But I can't imagine trying to do the whole thing in Jupyter.
Excel is an amazing piece of software esp for a power gui. But so is Python. For my work I'm either dealing with about 1k rows max... or I'm dealing with millions of rows or more, things that break excel. Or multi terra, stuff that likes a cluster.
If you've never programmed, "just use SQL" is super daunting. OTOH, Excel gives you access to that kind of data query power without writing code, and the people who are good at it can do pretty amazing things with it. It's a different way of solving that problem.
It's a powerful tool, and it's a well-built one (again, it pains me to say, bc I grew up hating MSFT). If you're on a platform that has access to a native app, exploring it can actually be fun.
It's not something most people would choose their operating system for.
Just because the average HN poster doesn't interact with these people from their tech silo doesn't mean they don't exist.
And yeah, there's a real history in computing of spreadsheets literally driving platform adoption.
In my world, Office is only used when you are consulting to companies where most data is for monthly meetings made of people that don't really care.
Googles suite of tools have been first class citizens at almost every company I've been at.
Excel is so far ahead of Google's offering - or anything else in that space -- that it's ubiquitous. It's insanely powerful, and its power is accessible to nontechnical people. That's an enormous thing.
Remember, spreadsheets were the original "killer app" that got PCs into the biz world. They're still a huge part of everyday life for vast numbers of workers -- and not just in the midwest as you sneeringly suggest.
> it's ubiquitous
it isn't - as I stated elsewhere I've never worked at a company where MS Office tools were a first class citizen, while almost every company I've worked at uses google docs/sheets frequently.
> It's insanely powerful
maybe? I mean I think if you need powerful tools excel/sheets is never the solution - they are really good at solving simple problems easily - there are better fits for problems that need "insane power"
> its power is accessible to nontechnical people
very fair point - the on ramp gets nontechnical people to become technical, but it is _not_ easier to do complex things in excel/sheets than in a general purpose programming language. It's just more accessible.
> as you sneeringly suggest.
starting and ending with a point to make the parent sounds malicious when no malice needed to be interpreted.
I think I will go back and downvote now. It's simply not a conversation that warrants much of any emotional response. We're talking about boring tools here.
2. There's no "maybe" about Excel's accessible power. You have a bias to coding, which is predictable here, but "just learn to code" is not the answer for most people who just want to ask questions of the dataset. Excel does this for them. So yes, if you need powerful tools, spreadsheets absolutely ARE VERY OFTEN THE SOLUTION.
3. The power available to someone who learned to code at 12 is one thing, but that power is fundamentally alien and totally unapproachable to the average MBA in finance. And consequently it's entirely irrelevant. OTOH, Excel with its host of data science add-ins is HIGHLY available and will allow the user to get answers without having to learn to code. This is power.
My comment re: "as you sneeringly suggest" was 100% directed at pknomad, who snarked that the only people using something as tragically unhip as spreadsheets were in the midwest -- i.e., out of step with the mainstream and tied to ways of the past.
I stand by that comment without reservation, but it wasn't directed at YOU given that it was a reply to someone else.
My observation is based on the fact that most companies in mid-west (even Chicago yes) use Office generally because they're migrating from on-premise Microsoft solutions. I'm not passing any judgements.
Cargill, Old Republic Insurance company, et al all use Office365 or Microsoft solution.
Excel is indeed ahead of G suite offering but my post never made any indication otherwise.
Sure, if you're a software company GSuite is good enough.
Our o365 was down for about half the trial period. We chose google....
And by "legacy" I presume you mean, "Have been around at least 30 years." Sorry to tell you, but the Walmarts of the world aren't so much legacy as established.
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-g-suite-gmail-2-billi...
Regarding you experience with GSuite, assuming that you have used MS Office previously, do you find it sufficient for your needs?
I worked with MS Office before. My use of Word was the same and google docs, actually, I think is better due to a lack of fancy features. I just use basic text formatting in outline format and attached pictures.
I didn't use excel before.
So yeah I prefer gsuite to office. I had to do a document with word and track changes over email a few months back. It was brutal. Gsuite destroys that workflow.
Did those 3 companies have more than 1000 employees? 100?
Some might, but goodness knows I've never run into one. The corporate America I have interacted with so far (30 year career, so not trivial) is Office all the way down, and deeply enmeshed with Exchange calendaring. (I mean, as an MSFT-hater from the 90s, it pains me to admit this, but Exchange calendaring is materially better than anything else. Sometimes, Redmond does things well.)