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Comment by scubbo | Hacker News Reader

> I sometimes want to rip my hair out when I use Google Sheets compared to Excel

Earnest, non-"gotcha" question - what is it about Google Sheets that you dislike or find irritating? I'm only an entry-level user for both, but I've found them of similar quality and functionality.

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I have extensive experience with both and the main benefit Excel has over Google Sheets (in my opinion) is the amount of rows you can handle all at once. With Excel you can manipulate 200k rows easily. The same can not be said with Google sheets due to the fact that it remains a cloud based tool. I found Google sheet to be enough though in 90% of my cases (may change depending on what you usually work on). The scripting ecosystem google sheets has is amazing (apps scripts and various python libraries) and is much stronger compared to Excel.

> With Excel you can manipulate 200k rows easily. The same can not be said with Google sheets due to the fact that it remains a cloud based tool.

How is the number of rows related to cloud-based?

Updating a cell in Excel is a CPU round trip, whereas updating a cell in Sheets is a network round trip. An operation that touches as few as 1000 lines (e.g. autofill a large range, change a value that feeds into many cells) incurs many seconds of latency as it's fed through the cloud and the new cell data is refreshed. The more rows you have, the slower the response time.

Change cells in parallel, not in sequence.

That's helpful to know, thanks!

Google sheets is useful for basic tasks. But as a power tool for complex models etc. it pales in comparison to excel. Not to mention that keyboard shortcuts are not the same which makes everything take significantly longer.

Agreed. Google sheets feels great initially. Then you go to do that thing that you do in Excel, and...you look for it, and it seems like a basic omission, so you figure you just missed it, and Google around for it, and no, it's just not there.

Even silly little things, like the fact that Sheets doesn't have an indent function, which makes it harder to neatly format financial data. I think the accepted workaround is to manually put spaces in front of every single row you need indented.

^1 for Excel keyboard shortcuts.

One can customize the ribbon at the top for must used functions, which can make Excel such a fast tool to use compared to Google Sheets or even Excel for Mac (speaking as a Windows user).

If I had a big Excel project to do, and I had the choice of 1/2 day on Excel (Windows) vs. a full day with Google Sheets or Excel (Mac), I would pick the 1/2 day with Excel (Windows).

Agreed..I actually have a separate laptop (Windows) that I use for nothing but excel. Even Excel on Mac isn't the same as on Windows

I removed the F1 from a keyboard so that I don't misfire when going for F2, resulting in the dreaded 'Help' window that you have to use a mouse to click out of.

Microsoft PowerToys on Win10 will let you remap keys. If nothing else you could make F1 do what F2 does.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/

Ctrl+Space, C used to work for closing the Help window until recent versions. Unfortunately that doesn’t work anymore, the only solution is to use a VBA macro bound to a keyboard shortcut. At least in return the keyboard focus now remains in Excel instead of switching to the Help dialog.

The keyboard shortcuts improve productivity so much. Yeah, as another said it’s amazing when I try to use Excel on a Mac how much I evidently depend upon the shortcuts in normal use. They’re all different on the Mac version, and I can only take so much of it before I just email myself what I was working on and pick it back up on the PC. Seems like an easy thing for MS to reconcile but I don’t want to give up my keyboard mapping, and I’m sure the Mac Excel guy doesn’t either. Nice feature would be to choose what shortcut layout you wanted despite platform.

This is true of GSuite generally. So long as you need fairly basic functionality (which is all a lot of people need), its simplicity is a virtue and it works well. I prefer it to Microsoft Office 99% of the time. (Though I sometimes need Office for interoperability as well.)

I used to sometimes have to run massive spreadsheets. But these days, I mostly use it for things like personal activity tracking.

What we'd do - as the layer between engineering and upper management - was to do as much aggregation as necessary using notebooks and at the end run the "export to google sheets" call (thin layer on top of google apis). That would give the recipient some kind of control and allow them to feel the data and twist and turn it their own way, while not having to do the "big data" python/SQL stuff themselves.

I am at a new company now and I have yet to figure out how to create the "export to onedrive/excel" command. Google libraries to google sheets seemed so much more competent and well built. (But maybe i am biased...)

> Earnest, non-"gotcha" question - what is it about Google Sheets that you dislike or find irritating?

Using Tables in Excel is a gamechanger. Not having support for them is a huge point of frustration for me whenever I have to use GSheets. 95% of that is the fact that I can refer to the Table and columns by a given, logical name rather than having to use arbitrary cell identifiers.

Excel Tables combined with Excel Power Query will turn "hey boss, I figured out a way to save a few hours a week" into "hey boss, I just eliminated several people's jobs".

The best answer is probably to watch this video by Joel Spolsky (founder of StackOverflow, among other things): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c&ab_channel=JoelS...

It's a kind of tongue-in-cheek video explaining why "You Suck at Excel", but what it's mostly doing is going through a ton of really awesome Excel features, many of them things you can't do in Sheets, and explaining them to a technical audience.

Highly, highly recommended - most of the stuff in that lecture I use every single day.

Google sheets has a 5 million cell limit, and can't usefully do things cross-workbook. In practice complex spreadsheets substantially smaller than that are slow and unstable.

That said, the multi-user editing is much smoother than excel and the remote API is better.

Except that it keeps changing. It's already on version 4 and at least one forced a complete rewrite of accessing cell values (and of course the old version was discontinued). Compared to Excel files from the 90s that keep running

As someone who pretty much only uses them for quick and dirty data shaping, at least for me Google Sheet's filter experience is garbage compared to Excel. Takes 5 clicks to do anything, can't right click to add/remove filters, the filtering process itself is janky, doesn't recognize data types ...

Sheets is awesome and has a lot of power, but it’s constrained in the browser and is defined by its competitor.

The other issue is that you don’t see as many power users of Google Docs and Google doesn’t have a clear strategy. For example, they could easily make a power bi type tool on top of Sheets and Slides.

Like Data Studio?

Right, but why invest more in that when they also offer Looker?

I didn't know about Looker, but my BI needs are modest and Data Studio is free and simple enough.

Looker is a third party solution right? Or does Google offer Looker directly in some way? If you're up for sharing the pricing for looker, I'd be curious (the looker website has a request quote button, so I'm guessing it's not cheap)

Google offer Looker directly, they acquired them a couple years ago. Pricing is in the mid to high tens of thousands a year.

Went through a product evaluation and that product was never mentioned!

My personal gripes are the lack of tables, RC notation and iterative calculation

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