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Comment by vlovich123 | Hacker News Reader

Quotes from people 30 and above which sounds about right. Is anyone these days growing up using Excel over Google Sheets? You used to have to pirate Excel and Google just gives it away for free with a free email account.

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Excel leaves GSheets and all its alternatives in the dust in terms of performance and stability.

I used to maintain MIS trackers in Google Sheets once, and when my company made the inevitable shift to MS Suite I saw an immediate improvement. FWIW I'm 25.

Well, not all its alternatives. There's one spreadsheet out there that has better performance than Excel: https://rowzero.io/home

How is its offline performance?

I think you’re talking about it in a professional environment. That won’t matter if the people are growing up on GSheets today & demand that tool from their employer. Very old tale in SW.

Employers will tell them that their serious sheets only work in excel and it’s similar enough that they’ll figure it out and they’ll be right on both counts.

Depends on the profession. The company might shell out money for accounting to use excel. But PMs, engineers, TPMs, etc etc are likely to be told “hey we’re using google workplaces and aren’t going to buy you an excel license” unless you can make a very convincing case. That represents a shrinking pie for Excel even if specific professional use remains on Excel while everyone else moves on. Similar stuff happened with things like COBOL, IBM mainframes, etc. That’s why Microsoft competes with their 365 offering, but Google really put a dent in Microsoft’s near monopoly on OS+productivity tools that they built up and cemented in the 90s/early 00’s.

In my experience it depends more on the company you’re in than on the profession.

I worked for an MSP in Europe, so IT provider.

No company used Google Workspace. All where Office 365.

Equally I’ve never worked for a company in my life that uses office or 365. At most in one org the CFO and his direct report had office licenses for excel.

In working for a European company right now that is a pure google workspace shop. (Though I work remote and am not based in Europe myself.)

I’ve got zero idea how to use excel because I’ve simply never worked for an org that has deployed Microsoft products and I’m nearing 40.

Wild how different our experiences can be. I’d be totally open to trying out Microsoft products but it’s just never come up. In the same vein, I’ve never used windows in my career either (though I have administered windows server but that was only due to it being a requirement for some VMware stuff and it was treated like a leper.)

I started my career with Linux and most roles since have deployed/provided MacBooks with OSX.)

GSheets are honestly a nightmare to use in case you have a nontrivial volume of data to work on. It won't do for most enterprise uses, especially in BI.

I recall how many hoops I had to get into to convert one data dump into anything readable on it. And the update latency goes up to several minutes for the same job that Excel would take barely a second to finish. No non-stupid employer will have their team use GSheets for anything serious no matter what "youngsters" may demand. Also, on a side note I haven't seen a single instance where any business decision was made keeping into account what young employees were originally familiar with.

Certainly compared to early Google Sheets this is true, and it may be that first impression that a lot of older people still remember.

Google Sheets today is totally adequate for most people's spreadsheet needs. I'd believe there are cases where Excel is still better, but they are at the extreme end of "power user" use cases.

For sure. Google sheets is good enough to be tolerable.

If a work place forced sheets on me, I’d resort to excel in the background. (I would fit in the excel power user category).

I love GSheets for convenience. But as soon as you're doing anything large and complex, GSheets might as well not even exist. It's simply not viable.

GSheets is the good enough factor and the collaborative features were baked in from the start. I feel like MS struggles a bit in that respect. Look at the instructions for collaborating in Excel: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/collaborate-on-ex...

I’ve had the pleasure of investing many hours across excel and gsheets. I’m currently at an org that uses MS suite and excel collaboration across OneDrive & Sharepoint is almost seamless now as long as long as you’re on the cloud

I don't think people are remotely aware how Good MS tools are atm when it comes to collaboration and integration with their "other" suit of tools. Yes, it's ugly sharepoint under the hood somewhere, but for all intents and purposes it looks and works like magic when I'm collaborating in real-time with my coworkers over any sort of MS document. This whole "real time collaboration" comment as a reason to prefer some half-baked and confusing "GSheets" web app is frankly confusing.

Though, now that I think about it, it kind of makes sense: We are in an industry where the newcomers are being indoctrinated via evangelists and overall Schadenfreude, into using half-baked "IDEs" like VSCode.

Our team runs into errors (changes not syncing, etc.) on a regular basis 'collaborating' with Excel. definately doesn't work like magic in my experience.

But is the cloud version of Excel feature parity with the desktop for the pro users that claim that Google sheets isn't good enough? If the cloud version of Google sheets is the same as the cloud version of Excel, then that's not the same thing at all.

Yes as long as you are running your spreadsheet on the desktop version. You can open them up on the browser version too which is total trash but you’ve got full functionality of your cloud spreadsheets while on the desktop app

I have private information in my files, and I don't want to share it with google. Google will scan it, use it for ad profiling, sell to whomever and store all commits for eternity. Quote probably government has access too.

And, of course, they will use it for AI training, which could be reverse-engineered in the future to extract training data.

Exactly.

I always have at least one machine setup with all local tools and storage.

Any new ideation and certainly anything private gets done on that computer first.

Free isn’t good enough. Sheets has stupid limitations like a hard cap of 10M or so cells per document.

Immediately focusing on the distinction between Microsoft Excel Proper and competing implementations with essentially similar functionality is so weird to me. I feel a fondness for this article despite not having used Microsoft Excel itself for like two decades. The point is the larger genre, and the empowerment of programming and data management capabilities it creates for regular users.

I worked for an MSP in Europe, so IT provider.

No company used Google Workspace. All where Office 365.

You use what the company wants you to use :)

If you zoomerettes try to use your own google account you will get flagged for data extraction. :)

Also the web version of office is free, did you know? https://www.office.com/

But then you have all the usability issues of a complex app shoehorned into a browser. I'll always use a native application when it's available.

Sheets is unfortunately mostly better than Numbers.

Not disagreeing, but I find it very ironic that there’s little difference in performance between Excel as a native app and as a web app. I don’t know if that mostly reflects the technical prowess of the web dev team or the inefficiencies of the native app.

That's incorrect. Not only is the web app drastically trimmed of features, but is also in no way a match to the native app in performance.

You can test for yourself - try doing some complex operations on large datasets on both. See which one performs better.

Excel is free online too.

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