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Comment by Vaslo | Hacker News Reader

I just want to say as someone in Finance who works in Spreadsheets all day that Google Sheets is just NOT a replacement for Excel. All the functions, size, and some of the external tools built for Excel are just not in Sheets. I know some of you say “well of course not for what you do” but there are Microsoft haters who just wont believe me when I say that.

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I work at the Google office in Chelsea, New York. One day, my old manager and I were talking about the future of GSuite and how entrenced MS Office is. We were next to a south-facing window and he pointed out toward all the buildings in downtown Manhattan: "all those buildings run off of Excel."

I think the collaboration benefits of Google Sheets is high enough that it can be the default for most employees. Perhaps MS Excel should be used only by specialists, like how only a fraction of any company uses Photoshop.

Collaboration was certainly my driver for using Google Sheets, but most, if not all, of that functionality is in Excel Online now.

Is Excel Online still as slow as it used to be a couple of years ago? I remember reading (perhaps here on HN) about how it basically spun up a headless Excel instance for each user since they couldn't extract and decouple all the functionality necessary to run some of the more advanced features.

EDIT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17304660 (June 2018)

> Excel is a different world and a big-big elephant that won't likely be rewritten any years soon. Think of a code that is maintained over 30 years. Literally, developers are still maintaining code written in the 90s. Trying to bring Excel to the online world made MS create an architecture of html frontend which communicates with a dll session behind the scenes. As weird as it sounds, this dll lives as long as the browser has the spreadsheet opened. Think of it as MS raising VM for every excel file that is opened over the internet. While this is not very cost effective (saying the least) and not very performance friendly (hey ma! I made an understatement) this allowed them to move forward with Excel online very quickly by having a UI communicating with the bloatware dll that runs on the background in Azure. Summarizing Excel, it probably won't also be rewritten in js.

I have the utmost faith in MS being able to do JS/Web optimizations after what they've been able to do with Visual Studio Code.

The difference is that VS Code was built ground up entirely separate in every way from Visual Studio.

There was zero compatibility to maintain, zero code to port, etc.

The free app in my existing email ecosystem is all it took for me

But there's probably at least one critical person in each of those buildings who uses PhotoShop.

So, you can't just get rid of PhotoShop, any more than you can just get rid of Excel.

The funny thing is, I'm a power-Photoshop user, and I find that photopea.com works reasonably well enough for me

I mean, ok lack of keyboard shortcuts and all when I'm wroking on masks, but when I'm not on a deadline it's fine

A bit of a red herring but I’m not overly familiar with google sheets, I use Excel. A problem I have is others can edit formula on NFS shared documents without it being clear what’s changed.

In my mind, collaborative software is like git, with a clear commit history.

Is google sheets that collaborative? Or do you need to trust the people you share it with?

You can set read and/or write permissions, as well as there is also a history which allows rolling back the sheet/viewing changes.

It’s not functions for me, you can create them and I adore google sheet for its versatility. But SPEED is the true problem. Whatever non-trivial you do, it becomes devastatingly slow.

That's where webassembly could really shine.

The part of Google Sheets that's syrupy slow is running in the cloud. Each the API calls from JavaScript Apps Scripts take on the order of tenths of a second to execute. It feels like they're all blocking remote procedure calls.

And scripts will time out and abort after just a few seconds (meaning they can only execute relatively few operations). So there is a very hard impenetrable wall blocking what you can do with scripting Google Sheets.

I could be described as a "Microsoft Hater" and I still prefer Excel over Google Sheets.

The trade-off of functionality and general control isn't worth for the "Share! Collaborate! Contribute!" hype.

"For what I use it for" I guess, but after going full Linux I've been on LibreOffice [or similar] alternatives. Just not Google Sheets if I can ever, ever help it.

I was a heavy user of Excel for my personal life, finances, tracking, todo, everything for about 6 years because it was installed on my work computer. My timekeeping work was also 99% Excel sheets. My personal sheets were always on a USB Disk.

Now I moved to US & do not have dedicated desk, & strictly not allowed to plug anything in work pc, fireable offense. So I am back to use Google Sheets because I can access those at my phone, & Sheets is not the same. Maybe 50%, but many simple things in Excel are difficult in Sheets. The most being Calculate Formula button in Excel.

I think they are different tools:

Sheets -> Great collaborative experience for simple to moderate complexity use cases.

Excel -> The heavy artillery.

I believe Sheets contains virtually all Excel functions, and while Excel supports 1M rows, Sheets supports 5M cells, so they can both outperform each other in size depending on how many columns you have.

But yes, add-on tools are going to be platform-dependent in both directions.

Actually, in Excel, you can have unlimited rows by using power query.

Can you list some specific examples?

Joel Spolsky has some examples in his talk about excel: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c).

I particularly wish Google sheets had the tables feature.

"All the functions" - I guarantee you that almost any function you want in Excel is in Sheets. Just because you don't know how to use it or find it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. The only reason you know how to use Excel better is that you have past experience with it. That's, effectively, the sunken cost fallacy.

"size" - what?

"some of the external tools" - duh? But what on earth are using using "external tools" integrated to Excel for?

> But what on earth are using using "external tools" integrated to Excel for?

Off the top of my head: Operation Research... i.e. serious calculations to decide where to spend a lot of money, like: Where should I build my power station? I know, for this I will get my mixed integer programming suite out. Where is that in Google sheets???

// note, I adore Sheets, but it definitely definitely cannot compete with excel for serious computation suites or even modest visualisations.

The integrations in Excel are actually very important for power users. There's a reason Thinkcell can charge a couple hundred dollars per user.

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