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Comment by robertlagrant | Hacker News Reader

This is why Google Sheets should be taking over the world. API-accessible, Javascript-scriptable, nice collaboration features. How are they not beating Excel online?

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It's a horrific product for anyone who actually has to use a spreadsheet for work. The developers seem pre-occupied with building strange bells and whistles while ceding power user functionality to Excel. Using Excel vs. Google Sheets saves me easily 20 hours a week.

What is missing in Sheets that would save you 20 hours a week vs. Excel? Genuinely curious to hear real world examples from a power user, because in the worst case scenario I use JS/G Apps Script to automate analysis/organization, which is actually a preference for me if I can't do it easily enough with a formula. I also can't stand Excel UI

I switched from Google Sheet to Excel when I needed to actually do some work on phone.

Google Sheets are surprisingly bad on phone. I wanted to "just" do drag-to-fill (or whatever is the name... that + thing that appears when you go to bottom right)... I could not do that on iOS Google Sheets?

And in general, Google Sheets on mobile are surprisingly poor.

If you name a cell in Excel, then use it in a formula by clicking on the cell, Excel will use the name in the formula. Sheets won't, which misses the whole point of naming cells.

Im interested in this too as my experience is the same as yours.

Personally I feel like going in to JS/G apps script is actually a big bonus as it means you avoid some of the really gross stuff that you get in excel (which ime ends up being really hard to maintain).

For larger spreadsheets google sheets is far less performant than Excel, even the cloud version of Excel.

I recently had to create a power set in Excel and had to use this VBA monstrosity: http://www.tushar-mehta.com/excel/tips/powerset.html

I haven't used Google Sheets yet, but looks like I could just use their API and use a simple PIP package?

Aren't they? Do people use excel online for anything but viewing spreadsheets they have received via email or Teams etc? What they probably aren't beating is Excel the desktop app.

UI performance is awful. And desktop Excel is also scriptable.

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