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Comment by pradn | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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