Hacker News Reader

Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

Makes me wonder if there's a market for an Excel clone whose files are easily machine- and human-readable, and version-control friendly.

View on HN

If you are using XLSX files (Excel 2007 and later) you can use an Excel diff driver with Git for not terrible version control - http://programmaticallyspeaking.com/git-diffing-excel-files....

Awesome, I never knew you could change the diff drivers in git. Such a well-thought-out tool

Google Sheets lets you download the workbook as an Excel file which can be automatically saved to a Google Drive folder. Hourly (?), daily, weekly, monthly snapshots of a shared workbook can all be easily scripted and stored for later retrieval. It eliminates any confusion over which is the latest workbook because the Sheets version is always the most up-to-date.

O365

Google Sheets

Have you tried using Google Sheets? I have. You can't even cut and insert a bunch of rows. That's a primitive functionality that is very much needed that was available in Excel circa 1988 (I'm exaggerating, but it's been in Excel for at least 2 decades).

While sheets is nowhere near my idea of ergonomic, I've figured out this one every time I needed it. And, despite working for Google, I'm nowhere near a regular user.

Maybe your browser, or some extension, got in your way?

Sheets is way less powerful than Excel. Losing a lot of the keyboard shortcuts also makes it way less useful for power users. It also doesn't do well at generating macros and its chart generation capabilities are much less flexible.

Google Sheets is the main reason I gave up on Google Docs and bought an Office 365 subscription for myself a few years back. It's just nowhere near as good as Excel. Frankly none of the Google Docs offerings holds a candle to Microsoft Office[1], so the latter is well worth the money to me.

[1] I am tactfully not counting GMail as part of GDocs here because, honestly, Outlook is the one tool that wouldn't come off well in that comparison, and reason #1 is that Outlook's search is terrible; reason #2 is that Outlook doesn't perform at all well in the face of the modern "I want to keep all my mail so that I can search for and find relevant messages whenever I need them", which can be key when dealing with tricksy customers/partners/co-workers, and is handy even in mundane day to day use.

"Frankly none of the Google Docs offerings holds a candle to Microsoft Office"

Word and Excel are great for individual productivity. If you use documents and spreadsheets as tools for collaboration, though, Google Docs is much much better overall, even though it's missing many features to which power users have become accustomed.

Sure, you can save a file to OneDrive and have multiple people working on it at the same time. But:

- In my experience, simultaneous editing via OneDrive (whether using the browser or the desktop apps) is more laggy and buggy than with Google Docs

- The commenting functionality is missing lots of features that are essential to my desired collaboration workflow:

i) Ability to give someone access to add comments and suggest changes, but not to accept changes or edit directly

ii) Comment authors are identified, and only they can edit comments they have written

iii) Comments can be received and replied to by email.

The way commenting works in Google Docs encourages collaboration in a way that the simple comments in Word doesn't. If you've not worked somewhere that uses Google Docs for collaboration, it can be hard to know what you're missing.

So Google is "much much better overall" for multiple users, as long as you can dumb what you're working on down enough to fit Docs significant limitations. That's totally fair, but isn't a trade off everyone can make.

Yes, there's a trade-off. Note, I didn't say Google Docs is better for every use case. I said it's better "If you use documents and spreadsheets as tools for collaboration".

The key difference I'm talking about is between:

A. Writing a document, and sending a version of that document to one or more other people, so that they can do something with it. (This might involve sending you back feedback or suggestions.)

B. Sharing a link to a 'living' document, with which people can interact in different ways (comment, participate in comment threads, add change suggestions, accept/decline changes).

In my experience, B is much harder to achieve, and unlikely to happen organically, if you use Microsoft Office.

Has anyone here witnessed an organisation that uses Microsoft Office, and where significant progress is made on people's thinking, through their online collaboration on docs/sheets?

> If you've not worked somewhere that uses Google Docs for collaboration, it can be hard to know what you're missing.

I have (for a previous company), and it still hasn't proven worth it at other companies, including my current employer. We use Office 365 exclusively: it's not perfect but, as I say, Excel is streets ahead of Google Sheets in every other way, and that matters for our use cases.

We use Google Sheets as a team for its collaboration functionality. However it still has a lot of room to improve with its visual customization for charts and formatting and such.

I realize some people don't care about how beautiful a spreadsheet looks, but in presentations or sharing complex information, it matters. And formatting anything complex with charts and such is a major headache in Sheets (like my latest struggle to get annotations to properly appear, or move a single peak data label so it isn't cut off from displaying).

The thing about Google Docs is that I haven't seen any changes or updates to get toward feature-parity since I was using it in high school a decade and a half ago. I assume it has been exiled to Google's island of misfit toys that they can't quite take out back and shoot just yet.

I hope not. Google has fairly recently made the Docs API available.

Everyone commenting: Google Sheets is not an exact copy of Excel, but it's the closest (I know of) that exists.

For plain-old Excel with version control, save your Excel files in Dropbox. MSFT might also offer a cloud version with version control but I have no experience with it.

Are Google Sheets "easily machine-readable"? I've tried to add support for it to my application, and I could not get it to work at all. Maybe it's technically possible but it's sure not easy. You need to use Google's proprietary APIs, and the documentation and support are terrible.

I've pulled some data from a sheet into a python notebook by copy-pasting some code I've found. Sure, these are proprietary APIs, but how else would you talk to a proprietary web service?

Disclaimer: despite working for Google, I don't know that much about the suite.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com