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Comment by aaisola | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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...)

^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.

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