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Comment by partiallypro | Hacker News Reader

> Google Apps in the enterprise

Google Apps for business are so bad though, I genuinely don't know why a company would pick it over 365. I could maybe see an SMB, but 365 is so robust in its offerings and just so much better all around.

My former employer was on 365, my new employer is on Google Apps. It's like I've been thrown back into the stone age. (Went from a large corporation to a start-up.)

I feel like an SMB is not likely to do volume purchases of Chromebooks, but a large corporation is...which Google just fails at in their offering in the office space, imo.

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> My former employer was on 365, my new employer is on Google Apps. It's like I've been thrown back into the stone age.

Oddly enough, we had exactly the opposite experience when a previous employer went from 365 to Google. The Google apps just worked, while the Office 365 apps ranged from hilariously bad (Yammer & Lync) to not completely terrible (the web version of Word) to mostly decent (the web version of Excel).

But man, Yammer & Lync were like a joke after using Hangouts. A really bad joke, told by a sadist. A sadist who is shorting one's stock.

Yammer is useless, but I found Lync to be very reliable. Why use Hangouts if your company is using Slack for team channels, and it has group video chat? Of course Lync is now "Skype for Business" and I don't think its as good as Lync was tbh. I think Microsoft should buy Slack and toss it into its Office 365 offering, if you want my honest opinion.

The web version of Word and Excel are vastly superior to Google's docs and sheets, I don't know how you can argue otherwise. Though, I don't know why you'd use them when you get the full versions for free in your 365 (which totally demolish Google's offerings.) Docs hasn't really done anything since it first launched, while sheets does have decent integrations...but it's no Excel.

Now 365 has baked in project management, Delve, business insights etc. There is no comparison.

What issue do you have with Google apps that Microsoft does better at?

Google docs hasn't moved forward since it was first released. Its as feature poor as ever.

The style of charts is so bland it has a java applet in a myspace page feel to it. There are no multi-column layouts. Some things can be created offline, but not drawings etc.

Recent Powerpoint on the desktop is just lightyears better at animation. The Office 365 nonsense lags behind - it can view, but not create, the fancy animations etc.

Basically, I was forced to go back to Powerpoint, and I didn't want to.

Given that the google docs today is the same google docs from five years back, I figure that Google invests 0% in them and using them themselves.

It is really frustrating - it wouldn't take a programmer more than a few weeks to clean things up and make real headway. I really can't cut google no slack on this - its an unloved backwater of featurelessness.

I'm not sure if you're saying you think that Google doesn't use Docs, Sheets, etc inside of Google but that is the entire opposite of what is happening. Anything that you'd normally do in Office is done on Google for Work at Google. There really isn't any other option available.

Disclosure: I work at Google

If you are a heavy Excel user, Sheets just doesn't compare in many ways. Even for basic things such as pivot tables. The interface is just painful, and you flat out can't do certain things.

I really with that team would bring it up to feature parity similar to how Marissa Mayer grabbed everything she could from AdWords in terms of features and UI design.

And Sheets isn't aimed at Excel power users. It's just that Excel is seen as a niche tool in the same way Photoshop or a programming IDE would be. I think that's fairly reasonable.

I consider things like pivot tables to be more mainstream and not relegated to just power users.

So the statement I responded to:

>"Anything that you'd normally do in Office is done on Google for Work at Google."

...is just not accurate. Not to mention other super basic things like a lot of the formatting options, etc. Those most certainly are basic user needs, and you can't do half the formatting things you can do in Excel.

I pity you all.

You are forced to use it, but seemingly nobody is allowed to improve it.

I too use it daily as my employer is a google apps customer. Which is why I am so frustrated and really need to vent about how featureless it is, and especially about how its improvement trajectory is so flat.

It's probably just targeting a different feature set than you need. Personally Sheets does what I need a majority of the time. Many of the google office-like products support Apps Script[0] as well so you can build on it a bit (hence all the 3rd party addons).

You also mentioned animations and transitions for slides. Personally I like the minimalistic use of slides (it should be background to what you're actually talking about, not taking center-stage). But that's the developer in me, and I'm sure lots of business-like people out there prefer the pretty and animations.

[0] https://developers.google.com/apps-script/

Maybe Google doesn't really need to create sales presentations. It's really hard to get good looking stuff out of Docs or Slides.

    Importing vectors like .eps is not possible. 
    Creating a new document to a directory using your business template is impossible. 
    Copies of documents are created in root directory. Moving requires navigating in a tiny window without search. (Makes template usage even worse.)
    There are no small caps. 
    You can't load custom fonts.
    No log axis in Sheets. (There is histogram though so it's better than Excel!)
    No backups, no change management, easy to destroy whole google drive by one user dragging wrong. NOBODY SHOULD EVER DRAG ANYTHING.

It feels like an uneven product.

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