It’s fine as a replacement for Word (I guess? I’m not much of a Word user). But Excel is so far ahead. And the ergonomics of working in a real application vs a web app is a significant difference.
Google Docs is to Word what Google Sheets is to Excel in terms of functionality. As long as what you're doing is simple, it's fine, and if what you're doing requires collaboration, it's great. But when you want to do something remotely complex, Docs and Sheets largely get their asses handed to them by Apple's free iWork apps, let alone Microsoft Office.
I think the big transition at PWC was 5 years or so ago I think, but to this day every document I get from them is Excel / Word. Despite how much work went into those accounts - these are not complex spreadsheets either!
- Regex support in find & replace and regexextract(). - FX rates as a formula instead of as a data type. IIRC Excel requires 2 columns to display a FX rate (one to specify the pair, one to print the number); Google Sheets specifies the pair inside the formula.
Example: How do you enter a cell to edit in Excel? On the desktop (I'm a mac user), it's ctrl-u (yep - ctrl). On the web I can't find any shortcut. I have to double click the cell like an animal.
Example: How do you select all the text inside a cell. On the mac it's cmd-a as you'd expect, on the web it's ctrl-a. Sigh.
The seamless collaboration of Google's apps is a joy, though as you've indicated, you give up a lot of features and power.
I'm an Excel fan as well but in our case it simply would not work due to the fact the team is spread across so many locations.
** Google Docs encountered an error. Please try reloading this page, or coming back to it in a few minutes.
To learn more about the Google Docs editors, please visit our help centre.
We're sorry for the inconvenience. - The Google Docs Team **
... It went away 10 minutes later, but I can't have that in the middle of a working day.
Sorry, the file you have requested does not exist.
Make sure that you have the correct URL and that the file exists.
Get stuff done with Google Drive
Apps in Google Drive make it easy to create, store and share online documents, spreadsheets, presentations and more.
Learn more at drive.google.com/start/apps.
....
The above is actually an error produced by me just trying to create a new blank page.
Sorry, I won't be going near Sheets for anything I care about. I'll try again in a year. The above annoyed the hell out of me.
I realize the parent question was more focused on how people find success with Google Docs, but if that success is primarily due to collaboration, and collaboration in O365 is now decent, I wonder if some of the justifications for using Google Docs still hold up.
I haven’t had many issues over the last 6-12 months, though, and as far as I can tell, they continue to improve.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m not a fan of MS products and as I said, I think Google still has the edge in collaboration. But they’ve come far, and it wasn’t that long ago that those collaboration features were unusable or non-existent.
I do a big charity bike ride every year, and track my donors in Excel (largely because the initial dump of donation data came from the org in that format).
I try to be smart about my appeals, and I rapidly ran into limitations on pulling certain sets of email addresses out of Excel easily/simply/etc., and my next-step turned out to be Jupyter. It's GREAT for that, and I can still keep my data in Excel as a source and just query against it.
But I can't imagine trying to do the whole thing in Jupyter.
Excel is an amazing piece of software esp for a power gui. But so is Python. For my work I'm either dealing with about 1k rows max... or I'm dealing with millions of rows or more, things that break excel. Or multi terra, stuff that likes a cluster.
If you've never programmed, "just use SQL" is super daunting. OTOH, Excel gives you access to that kind of data query power without writing code, and the people who are good at it can do pretty amazing things with it. It's a different way of solving that problem.
It's a powerful tool, and it's a well-built one (again, it pains me to say, bc I grew up hating MSFT). If you're on a platform that has access to a native app, exploring it can actually be fun.
It's not something most people would choose their operating system for.
Just because the average HN poster doesn't interact with these people from their tech silo doesn't mean they don't exist.
And yeah, there's a real history in computing of spreadsheets literally driving platform adoption.