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Comment by JonathonW | Hacker News Reader

Frankly, Docs, Sheets, and Slides are nowhere even close to Word, Excel, and Powerpoint in terms of feature set and usability. Sheets especially, but even in Docs and Slides I'll run into things I can't do.

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).

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You're right about the feature set. But, Google's products are good enough for most users. The justification for all the bloat in MS Office was always "people only use 20% of the features but each person's 20% is different." Well Google actually did a pretty good job of identifying the features that most people use. I hardly ever open up MS Office anymore (it isn't even installed on my main work computer).

Office 365 is though.

- 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.

I agree with your critique. This is just a hunch but I don't think they are ahead:

- 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.

I use Outlook.com as my main email provider. And I'm managing to convince people to move off've Gmail onto it because of it's streamlined interface. What do you find wrong in it?

It might just be a matter of preference but to me Outlook.com is an attempt to webify Outlook The Desktop Client, which was horrible to start with. But they made it worse than the desktop app.

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.

It's deliberately slow in Linux (applies to all Office products)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13932226

Issue still happens to me: easy to test switching agents.

That’s interesting, especially as that’s not what the link you’ve kindly referenced says. Congratulations on being able to change the user agent - Microsoft is not you and has to support decisions it makes. I can see why there’d be little cause for them to perform Linux testing given the small market share. So, if you were Microsoft - and not you - would you rather potentially break the experience for Linux users, or not enable what appears to be OS/browser specific code that speeds up the experience? Again, calling this a deliberate slowdown is extremely misleading.

The Outlook.com app that just rolled out of Beta (and seems much more closely related to the work the ex-Accompli team has been doing with Windows Mail app that is also the iOS/Android Outlook apps) is rather good. It's probably still a few months until it rolls out to most Office 365 tenants, though.

You can't beat Gmail labels and filters.

Outlook likes to duplicate things. They don't even have smart folder support in their web UI.

office 365 is far inferior to google docs for online collaborative document editing. You can lock the doc in office, you get into situations where it's very hard to safely have people collaborate on docs.

I don't find this to be true. For the last 2 years I have been using G-Suite and recently went back to O365. I find the collaboration features in the new version to be on par with googles. Also the UI is better, the online feature set is better, especially for PowerPoint and Word. As for Excel the desktop version is still the undisputed champion but it syncs up very quickly with others who are editing the same document on their desktop with excel.

6 months ago at my last company they used office and we used office 365 to collaboratively edit some word docs and we had a problem where the docs kept getting locked and others couldn't edit them. this doesn't happen with google docs. if you have a big collaborative doc its a problem, or was 6 months ago. Did it get fixed?

I have used O365 to collaborate on a spreadsheet and the experience was horrible. We had about 500 rows and 8 columns and it would lock up or just crash on us. We were not even collaborating. We just shared the file with 8 people and were trying to copy data from one tab to other (within the sheet).

Google Sheets was a much better experience for collaboration.

My experience has differed from yours. I've recently started using O365 for some client work. I'm really missing a few features from GSuite, that are important for collaboration:

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.

They are sort of.

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.

When I think of Sharepoint I think of a lot of things, but CRM is not one of them. I'm intrigued to hear more about how that works.

Microsoft also has Dynamics CRM

My home computers are all linux and GSuite is perfect for almost everything I do. I could see the issue with excel for many people in accounting/finance/etc, but sheets is more than enough for things I do as I don't do anything complex in a spreadsheet.

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

I haven't used G-Suite in years so I can't really compare it, but I use Excel online (via Office 365) to collaborate in real-time on documents with other employees all the time and it works great.

For most uses, Docs and Sheets "work". It is extremely easy to create a basic collaborative table or document. So long as you aren't stressing the sync features, everyone is on the same page.

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

To add to this, WordML is super powerful. Modern .docx files are basically just big zip files. You can easily edit this and do some crazy things and MS Word will be pretty good about reflecting this in the editor. G-Docs can have some issues with modified WordML.

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.

Collaboration also goes beyond collaborating to produce the document. My company makes decisions in the comments of Google Doc proposals.

Office has a robust commenting and review feature set as well.

Does it provide a function to merge the comments from tens of people’s individually annotated email attachments? If not, not really comparable.

For anything other than Excel, I actually vastly prefer Google stuff. Collaboration features and not having to worry about files outweigh the (small) downsides for me by quite a margin. Sheets is a bit of a laggard, but it’ll get there in another couple of years.

"Docs ... nowhere even close to Word ... in terms of feature set ... really shine, though, is in collaboration."

Contradiction. If your key feature is collaboration, GSuite is decades ahead of Office.

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