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Comment by helf | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, no thanks.

I work in a company that has forced Workspaces upon us and it randomly is a nightmare. Tons of functionality you get in Excel is not there. It is a complete nightmare adjusting access to random files. You often end up with files and folders "owned" by a user who no longer exists and then we have to get the central IT to go fix it.

Ugh. Everything being browser based with crap desktop clients is the worst. They also want to constantly share crap via Google Drive and, unless I have missed something major, you can't run Google Drive, in Windows at least, under multiple signed in users with the same drive letter. You'll just get access denied errors. THAT makes shortcuts and all a complete fucking nightmare.

I have to often shrug when my users have issues and send in a report to the Japanese head office and hope they respond timely. I know /that/ isn't a workspaces fault, but it just compounds things.

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I don't understand this sentiment at all. I have to deal with Outlook at work and it is hot garbage. I can't believe this competes with a web application from 2004. Yes, I get desktop Excel but I have never had to use any feature in it I couldn't get in Sheets (I use sheets a lot outside of work). Trust me you have it good. We do not even have Office 365, so our 'sharing' options are SharePoint. I would love to have Gmail for work.

I'd argue that Gmail (user interface, features, and performance) is the best part of Google Workspace and competes very favorably with Outlook. Excel, on the other hand, is a league above Google Sheets when it comes to performance and advanced features, although Sheets has a few unique things too. They both have their strengths and I'm happy to have the competition to make both better.

I won't argue that Excel is great. It is by far Microsoft's best product. It is an amazing accomplishment. Google has been able to do 85% of it and also added some great collaboration features. Yeah, it's not as good and probably never will be. No one will ever be on par with Excel. But the rest of Office is pretty bad.

It's hard to quantify exactly but Google sheets has nowhere near 85% of the features of MS Excel. Maybe 40%? There's tremendous depth to Excel which most users never touch, but which some of us absolutely need.

The latest release of Excel seems to be fully caught up to Sheets on collaboration features. We can save a file on Teams and then have multiple users editing simultaneously through a mix of desktop, mobile, and web clients it works really well.

What you're describing is so far outside my experience I wonder how we could be using the same application (teams, Sharepoint, excel)

Interesting, I realized after reading your comment that I had mentally parsed the above comment as meaning "85% of users have every feature they need" (and presumably some non-zero but decreasing percentage of the features the others need), but looking back I see that's not how it's phrased. It does make me think more about how "40% of features" versus "85% of features" should be interpreted though. Even assuming that there's agreement on what counts as a single feature versus multiple related but separate features (which isn't a guarantee), should every feature be weighted equally? I could see it being more reasonable to weight features by how necessary they are or by how much they're used; is the ability to do something very basic that almost everyone needs like summing a range the same "percent" as something more esoteric (I'm not a spreadsheet power user myself so I'm not sure what would be a good example here, but maybe calculating a regression of some obscure function class)?

> Yes, I get desktop Excel but I have never had to use any feature in it I couldn't get in Sheets (I use sheets a lot outside of work).

If that's the case, there's a pretty decent chance that you just have relatively novice spreadsheet skills/needs, so a basic tool will satisfy you (e.g. you're not so much evaluating your tools, but yourself). I'm not saying that's actually the case, just that "it works for me" gives very little information about the software you're using.

There are some cases like accounting departments that may definitely need the extra features from Excel. I guess I weigh the collaboration features Google provides over the extra features Excel provides. Google is still playing catch-up with Excel and probably always will be But Microsoft is a decade behind Google in basic mail management.

You don't even have to get that fancy in Excel before Google can't keep up.

But there's an even more basic problem - trading documents with Excel users. Trying to round-trip anything more than a simple data-only Excel doc through Google Docs is folly, especially if you keep passing a document back and forth.

In case it wasn't obvious, I have to use both. I have multiple external vendors where emailing Excel docs back and forth is how you do business. Internally, we're Google Docs, except where we're not, mainly anything that touches Finance or Legal. But the Windows IT folks also use a lot of Excel. And, you get the idea.

In conclusion, the idea that anyone has a "solution" that is supposed to actually solve "sharing" is hilarious.

Obviously, he's never worked for Contoso.

Power Queries is sorely missing in Sheets. There is no competition. The one area Google does better is in real-time collaboration. Also finding where a "file" exists in order to manage it is lacking in GWS.

There's the QUERY formula in Google Sheets that I actually like when I want to do some SQL-like queries and I don't believe it exists in Excel (yet)

https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093343

> "it works for me" gives very little information about the software you're using.

I don't think so. It says that the software satisfies the basic requirements of its target audience, and gives a hint as to who that audience is.

On the other hand, if you receive the opinion of some self-proclaimed expert, I think you're receiving less useful information. Experts are typically a small percentage of the userbase, and among experts there can be vastly different opinions depending on their specialty. Ask an Android dev to review vim, and an operating systems dev, and you'll get wildly different responses. If you ask a generalist software developer, you'll likely get less noise.

>>> Yes, I get desktop Excel but I have never had to use any feature in it I couldn't get in Sheets (I use sheets a lot outside of work).

>> "it works for me" gives very little information about the software you're using.

> I don't think so. It says that the software satisfies the basic requirements of its target audience, and gives a hint as to who that audience is.

No, not really. What's the "target audience"? The GGP certainly doesn't say, and wrote a comparison that is meaningless unless you're already very familiar with the software (transforming it into a statement about the particular user), and perhaps misleading if you don't. I could say the exact same thing as him, except about MS Paint, e.g.

Yes, I get desktop Photoshop but I have never had to use any feature in it I couldn't get in MS Paint (I use MS Paint a lot outside of work).

Does that say MS Paint is a powerful program, or that I'm an amateur user? You can't really say unless you already know the programs, since I didn't say anything about the kinds of graphics work I actually do.

> Ask an Android dev to review vim, and an operating systems dev, and you'll get wildly different responses. If you ask a generalist software developer, you'll likely get less noise.

No, you won't get less noise, you'll just get different noise.

google sheets (and microsoft excel online) aren't even close to the capabilities and speed of navigation of desktop excel. Like it is night and day if you are a heavy heavy user of excel. I'll admit some of what I've built up over the years would likely be better done in some combination like python and a database, but that's another topic for another day.

Libre office can replace sheets.

Google Sheets is wonderful in countless ways. It’s so handy to have multiplayer spreadsheets. But anyone who thinks it’s a drop-in replacement for Excel is a fool.

Right?

I mean, like I said, a lot of the complaints I have aren't really the fault of Workspaces.

We actually use the multiuser functionality of Sheets a lot but I still run into constant issues. And the fact a huge chunk of this crap does /not/ play nice with /multi-user local workstations/, in 2022, drives me bonkers.

Office 365 provides multiplayer spreadsheets, in addition to a great desktop client, and the ability to work in-browser if you prefer.

Cool I should give that a try. But a decade ago that didn’t exist and for undergrad and grad school Sheets was amazing. I almost did my dissertation in Docs but decided to use Pages instead (which was simpler than Word but a few times lacked what I needed… if I could do it again I’d of used Word)

A decade ago is a long time in tech. Which to be blunt: Should never color your opinions about technology today. Sheets was really neat a decade ago, but is just basic competency today.

Indeed! The lesson is to revisit things on occasion!

Sheets has had almost no updates for the last 10 years after getting to its current level of viability. I'm reminded of this 7 year old talk (You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky) where he goes over a bunch of great Excel features that still aren't in Google Sheets today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c

It’s hard to add features to something like Sheets or Excel. Large and finicky users are hard to please

And yet, somehow, some amazing features have been added to Excel recently. Dynamic array formulas and lambda functions have taken my Excel use to the next level. Let alone new standard functions (e.g. sort, filter, misc. text-manipulation functions).

Do they have QUERY like Sheets yet?

It's the typical way with Google products...

When the original dev team moves on to other projects, the new guys just make minor tweaks and no major product changes happen. Big new feature releases do things like "we moved this tool from the edit menu to the file menu".

Excel has had ability to edit same document by multiple people at the same time for at least 20 years. And is in process of discontinuing that feature.

I strongly prefer Office to Docs except for multi-user edits. Office on the web absolutely sucks and is miserable to use while a team of people is editing away IME.

This has been my experience as well. Google Docs have a premium collaboration experience.

You can be using your Excel windows client to edit a sheet, while someone else is editing on a web browser, while someone else is editing on an iPhone, while someone else is editing on an Android phone, while someone else is editing on a Mac.

Sheets is cool, but, Excel and Word and Office365 are streets ahead of Workspace from an enterprise point of view. I've been a staunchly non-microsoft guy for years. When I was younger I was the guy writing it at Micro$oft or more likely Micro$shit. These days, managing multiple companies, some of which use Office and some which use Workspace I cringe when I need to deal with issues on the Workspace side. There are some things which Google does better. Generally APIs for the Office365 products are not as good as the APIs for the equivalent Sheets/Docs/etc product. I've done some fun/funky things with using Google sheets as an adhoc database. Put a "job" in a row in a Sheets sheet and a few minutes later something does your task and you can see the result in that sheet. Super easy to do with Sheets API, I've tried for years to get similar CRUD to work on Excel API and always hit roadblocks.

Office365 APIs for user management and groups and all the "AzureAD" stuff is absolutely top-notch.

Anything Google Cloud or cloud related, google wins hands down.

So many choices. No one product to rule them all.

O365 multiuser Excel is awful. It’s pretty trivial for someone to fubar the XLS in such a way that it’s completely unusable.

Excel is probably one of the finest pieces of software devised. But not that part.

I've been using Google Sheets for years and always figured it was better than Excel.

For whatever reason, I recently got Excel and... yeah - way better.

Yeah the app script integration makes it even better.

It needs more resources not less, especially for the inbuilt fetching APIs, like Google finance

As a longtime user of both Microsoft Office and Google Suite, I will pick Gsuite over Office in an instant. Microsoft is security theater at its worst. You can never tell where your file lives. Is it on OneDrive or Sharepoint? How many links or direct access thingies has shared the file? Who actually has access?

I'm a software engineer, and for me gsuite is great-- more than enough. I think accountants will really miss excel though.

Everything you wrote doesn't even register as negative against the wall of unimaginable pain of using MS Office 365 with its "collaboration" features that are based on SharePoint.

Office 365 is a frankinstien of SharePoint? I've never used Office365 but Sharepoint is awful and I'd take Workspaces over it any day

Teams is actually an alternate front end for SharePoint and Outlook Groups that includes a chat client and phone plugin.

Both Google and Microsoft products are awesome in this space. They each have pretty serious deficiencies that may or may not be a big deal to you.

The first hint is that "business" OneDrive accounts take you to <org>.sharepoint.com instead of onedrive.live.com like personal accounts. They're meant to look similar but often work differently, unlike Google's personal and business Drive which are effectively the same thing.

Sharepoint frankenstein is the perfect way to describe o365 actually lol. All the images you post to teams, onedrive, where you save your cloud documents, all Sharepoint under the hood.

Excel desktop and web client are still a mess. One of the more common use cases IMO is nothing more than a table with filtering applied. That DOES NOT WORK with Excel under their Office 365 (now Microsoft 365) offering. Data simply won't match up and can easily be lost upon modification where what you see is NOT what you get. For that single reason I dread M365. *It has been like that for over two years and counting, multiple documents and less than a hundred rows and a handful of users.

This has not been my experience. Not only does filtering work, but in multi user documents it allows you to select user specific or document specific filters, so each user can filter separately.

It's not perfect, but most of the time it feels like magic.

Yeah this is my experience as well... As much as I love to crap on Microsoft this is the exact opposite of my experience.

I’ve been using excel online since 2020 and have numerous spreadsheets with pretty complex tables, filters and pivots and it works properly. And of course data matches up.

It is annoying that not all their features are available in browser, but I still prefer it over Google docs for anything other than lists.

Do you select the range and do Insert—>Table? Using an actual table is much better in Excel and the lack of this confuses me in Sheets but that’s probably just because I’m better trained in Excel.

I did not know about tables in Excel. Now I do and it may change my life...

> You often end up with files and folders "owned" by a user who no longer exists and then we have to get the central IT to go fix it.

That sounds reasonable to be honest. If someone leaves and has not left the files editable by others in a group... what's the other safe option? Someone has to be the arbiter of the permissions and the IT seems like a good choice.

And, with proper file discipline (everything being stored in shared drives (previously 'team drives')), this should never happen.

Please show me teaching proper permissions discipline to a company that goes from 5 to 500 employees and ret-con it to all of the older files like that random spreadsheet the former head of HR shared with legal with various employee PII on it such as SSN, Salary, Sexual Orientation, Name your most sensitive employee data etc on it that IT now sees / owns.

That’s a problem with Office too.

I can assure you that some asshat HR dude has dropped the “Gay Employee PII DRAFT2 Pre Final.xlsx” on his home drive or saved it to a public folder while trying to email it to his Yahoo account to work on it at home.

There's always going to be a huge amount of documents and drafts that people don't want to publish to their team but still want to save. Occasionally there's value in mining through these after somebody leaves but it also creates a privacy law nightmare since personal folders even at work can situationally count as personal information.

fast forward 10 years, you have 300,000 documents that various folks have access to. Now IT is the arbiter of reading a 40 page document and deciding on the data sensitivity of it and granting or not access. Now a founder retires who owned the folder that contained HR + marketing docs and it reverts to IT and revokes access to all of it. Injoy.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here - what's the other option? You don't have to deal with every single orphaned document - just the ones where people request access.

When the founder retires and the files did not get shared before, how exactly do you want to deal with that? (context: we're in a situation where we already know the standard handover / permission granting procedures either didn't kick in, or failed)

These online doc systems seem to lend themselves to massive proliferation of orphaned docs that are still accessible, versus ones that go away as they're on machines. Similar to issues with the internet never forgetting. And because it's good at not forgetting you have a fight to delete docs vs fight to retain them.

I don't get it - you're saying that losing information when somebody leaves because they kept it their local drive is somehow better then temporarily losing access in a manner that is easily recoverable?

In many cases yes actually. Not sure if you've had the sad experience of your parents passing yet, but it's real work to clean up. Drawers full of documents, including a receipt for Gum next to one for the upgrades on the house (one is tax deductable when you sell their house one is garbage). Let alone the really embarrassing stuff you find in say your parents night stand or that photo album.

Now multiply that by hundreds of employees over years, add in 50 revisions and forks of documents, legal liability, etc. Yes it's a giant pile that just gets worse.

It's all tradeoffs and a problem you hit when you get older and bigger.

Or your IT team can implement an offboarding process that does something reasonable here, like transfer ownership of any remaining files to the departing employee's manager. Or sequester them somewhere with specified access rules. Some version of this problem is present in any corporation but the right solution varies a lot.

Be careful - stuff in employees personal folders CAN count as personal information. Check the relevant local privacy legislation.

IT seems like a horrible choice; if they were paper documents left at a desk would IT take them over or the unit supervisor/manager? Almost certainly the latter. IT taking over business area responsibilities wherever a computer is involved rather than facilitating business units performing their work is almost always the wrong answer.

The comparison doesn't hold. Paper documents can be found by anyone, they get "open access" automatically, you leave them in your team's area, and the accidental losing scales differently (if you "lose" 1GB of paper documents, you notice).

> rather than facilitating business units performing their work

Sure, and the team which enables business units to deal with this internally is... IT. I'm not saying they have to deal with every single document, but if they enable this, they deal with things that fall through cracks.

Depends where you're coming from. Our (small, but international) company's accounting system is built on Google Sheets, with python scripts to import bank data.

We started with Xero, but it couldn't handle our international books. For instance the NZ IRD mandates particular exchange rates, and weird tax regimes (looking at you, Canada!) were way beyond it.

Sheets means a server can securely update data remotely, and we can instantly share data with our accountants. It's a five minute job to build a sheet that mimics tax reporting forms, and you can do financial what-ifs without having to dump data to Excel.

I'm sure Excel power users will hate Sheets, but Sheets power users will hate Excel just as much. Oh, and let's revisit this after your SSD dies just after you'd perfected the ultimate data analysis formula.

> Google Drive with multiple signed in users with the same drive letter

Are you rsyncing Windows NFS to Google Drive or something? If so, why!?

> send in a report to the Japanese head office

Oh, that's why. Are you still mailing floppy disks, or did they get with the program and upgrade to fax already?

https://www.zdnet.com/article/japans-digital-minister-vows-t...

Lol.

Luckily no floppies. But the Japanese are obsessed with over utilizing spreadsheets and want to create ones with VBA scripts for inter office use that require multiple users to utilize at once and they share them out via google drive. And their macros and scripts have hard coded pathing (don’t get me started) so they are hunting for the same drive letter path.

It took me a week to convince them what was happening when they first tried doing some of this. Beyond the hard coded paths they also had inline kanji and it was breaking everything on our American systems. Like excel would detect a broken and just delete the vba bin from the xlsx. It was kind of funny.

How many $B has Microsoft made off of Excel formulas and keyboard shortcuts?

Not to say they aren't delivering value, but I work in a place where many people have only used Google Sheets their whole career. They can't imagine running a finance org any other way.

For drive letters, IMO it's wrong design of Windows. Network drives and some apps' driver letters are assigned to users, while physical drives (and emulated drivers) are machine-wide.

Google Drive's desktop sync app is the worst piece of software I have used in recent memory. It simply can not sync large amounts of small files in any reasonable amount of time (hours and hours for 20GB of files on gigabit ethernet), will randomly leave things out from the sync with no explanation, and burn up 100% CPU the entire time. And if you move the sync folder it will re-sync from square one.

Sounds like OneDrive too though.... High CPU scanning for files. Between that and McAfee....

why use drives and not browse files in browser or the like? what's the use case?

Google drive has a Windows app that will create a fake drive like G:/ that is a shortcut to the actual folder on the file system.

The value of dropbox filesystem integration is huge (not a shill for DB). You can grep for stuff, do ordinary search, supply the files to any app that presents a file dialogue, etc.

Google drive files live in their own hermetic world. There is a desktop client but it doesn't reliably sync to the local filesystem; when it does most of the files aren't actually searchable so you have to do two searches if the file you want might be on google drive. So stupid.

Different accounts are hermitically walled off as opposed to the "different parts of the filesystem" way you can handle locally.

And even if you can somehow do everything inside the google drive, well stuff shared with you can't be part of your file organization like it could with dropbox or, you know, the filesystem. If someone shares a directory with you google drive still won't let you make it a favorite much less move it in with the rest of your files. No, it just keeps falling lower and lower in "shared with me" as other stuff is shared with you. Pathetic.

This is by design. Dropbox basically mirrors your local environment to the cloud; Google Drive makes the cloud your only environment.

Web browsers are slow, filesystem browsers are fast and you can index them with programs like everything or egrep? Familiarity?

I detest using web browsers to manage files honestly. I have yet to see it done well, there's usually a notable delay to descend into a subfolder. It's an awful experience really.

> You often end up with files and folders "owned" by a user who no longer exists and then we have to get the central IT to go fix it.

This is a problem for all across time.

> Tons of functionality you get in Excel is not there.

On the rare occasion I have to put something into Excel for some business person, it's a dump from CSV.

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