New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline

I recently went through an acquisition where we transitioned from Google Apps to the Microsoft suite. I do not share your love of Microsoft's suite.

Among the many problems I have with the Microsoft suite, Outlook is at the top of my list for generating the most frustration. GMail's priority inbox and new-style inbox where machine learning is used to sort out mail is a productivity booster for me. With Outlook, I regularly lose important mail because it is buried under the difficult to filter masses of other email.

I could go on about how the lack of robust collaboration facilities are a direct time waster for my team, but I don't want to hijack this thread further...

I would agree with you that excel is still more powerful than google spreadsheet but I don't agree that's because of native vs web type of app, because gmail is more powerful (and faster) than outlook. So let's call it subjective and give it a rest.

The main reason we switched to google apps is collaboration: all the features in the world do not really matter when the whole team can open and edit a document at the same time and work on it seamlessly.

I'm not here to defend Google apps (although I use them everyday) as much as web apps in general.

> Once you're used to real applications

What makes an application 'real' as opposed to 'not real'? Did you mean 'native'?

> It's not just the features that are missing

One potential upside to web apps is that, by constraint, a lot more thought needs to go into what should be included and what should be left out. For example, I find a lot of features in Word, Excel, etc. to be completely unnecessary and, moreover, counterproductive. A stripped-down interface, and even functionality set, does have some advantages.

> I can't assume I can right click and get anything useful

Often the case for native apps, although - admittedly - less so

> The concept of a consistent menu bar you can access with hotkeys is gone

Ditto. OSX almost solves the former at the expense of the latter. Applications like Chrome break the single-menu paradigm, though. Windows has a host of applications that invent their own menu styles/behaviours.

> And the input lag is intolerable.

Which specific file type? I rarely have problems with documents or spreadsheets.

> Having all of my documents stored centrally is a real, but small, convenience

It's a massive convenience for me. Dropbox is a good alternative, but I never want to go back to the days of having to remember to carry a specific USB stick everywhere I go and/or using network drives that are a nightmare to access anywhere but the office.

I'll give you maybe Excel, but for a standard document (and really most spreadsheets, which for me admittedly aren't very complicated and the real-time sharing is more important) Google Drive kills Microsoft's offerings to me.

Especially mail. Gmail and its web interface are far superior to Outlook in usability, far less frustrating experience to me.

Basically I disagree that 'native' apps will always be superior here. Docs and Gmail are already superior on the web IMO.

This is how a disruptive technology starts. Google Apps doesn't have to be better, but the idea is that one day, you'll find Google Apps "good enough", with all the benefits of being online (and now offline, too). You're just on the higher end of the power-user curve, but your "good enough" day is approaching.

I completely agree. I'm not impressed by the new features of Google sheets when desktop apps have had these features (and much more) for years and years. Sure, Sheets runs in a browser which is an impressive feat, but it can't match the speed, responsiveness, or the much richer interactions possible with a desktop app.

Plus, if I'm running a desktop app I can be pretty sure it's not tracking and recording my every action. Can the same be said for when you sign into to use Google Sheets?

>Using a native rich application is always going to be superior to building a web app on top of a browser.

Always? You think that will be true 20 years from now?

I hear that stuff all the time, but no one seams to be able to tell me what those features that are "just right" are.

   I can't assume I can right click and get anything useful

In a browser the right mouse button is generally not used that is right.

   The concept of a consistent menu bar you can access with hotkeys is gone.

Google apps have hotkeys just learn them, then you can use them.

   the input lag is intolerable.

That kind of depends on your computer/Internet line. For me google apps loads faster than outlook. But that is for me.

Our company probably saves something like 3000 USD per user by using google apps. Mostly administrative costs.

Could you list some features that are not just cause you are used to Outlook?

Wow that is so far from my own personal experience it's difficult for me to understand. I am occasionally forced to use Outlook and/or Excel and it tends to ruin a large part of my day. Real time collaboration isn't just a cute convenience, it's the primary staple of my workflow. Strange to have such differing experiences.

As a power-excel user I agree with you that Sheets isn't quite there yet. Trying to use the same shortcut keys that I'm used to often makes me want to bang my head against a wall, either because they don't work at all or because even if they do, it's not as responsive.

However, the pace of improvement is one that I think you should definitely consider before saying "never." Excel hasn't fundamentally changed for me since 2003 (outside of being able to more easily handle larger datasets from 65K+), so it seems like a fixed target while sheets continues to move closer (still with large gaps ahead!).

If I need to do financial modeling, I'll likely continue to use excel. However, for many low-touch projects, I've almost completely switched over to sheets, which wasn't the case even a year ago.

They (Google Apps, and Office) are different. People who cannot take the time to adapt to different will always find the 'other' system inferior to the one they know.

care to elaborate what things you're missing? I'm using Outlook/Exchange at work and find it extremely painful to work with. in Gmail i can get everything accomplished w/out using a mouse, it's really easy to label and go to labels, perform advanced searches sand easily create filters out of those. I'm using some Outlook plugins (i.e. ClearSight) to ease the pain but those have problems of their own. Even silly things like replying to an email in "sent" folder to include my previous response, Outlook defaults to replying to me so i have to "reply to all" and manually remove myself.. where as in gmail i can just hit "a" or "r" and it will know what i'm trying to do .. it's quite beautiful when you utilize more of the keyboard shortcuts.

I'm also at a company that's a 100% Google Apps and so have been forced to make a good go at it.

- Gmail is great for near-term communications, having chat in the same place makes it a nice communications hub for immediate and near-term communications. I like it better than Outlook and it seems much snappier in day-to-day use.

But I find it almost unusable when looking for emails from a while ago. It's so bad that I connect to my mailbox with Thunderbird and use Thunderbird's search to find anything. The problem is with the threaded conversations, I'll get search results, with the result buried somewhere in 1 of a 100 different emails in the conversation and as far as I know there's no easy way to sort through that pile.

- Calendar is actually pretty good. For my use as good as Outlook. It integrates nicely with Gmail and gets the job done. It's also pretty snappy in day-to-day.

- Document is okay for very simple things. Collaboration is a killer feature. But it's missing many of the things that makes Word superior. It's bad enough that people in my company who interact with anybody outside of the company are on the list for a personal MS-Office license...pretty much just for Word. The review functions (comments, change tracking etc.) in Word is absolutely needed if you work on any kind of contract/proposal paperwork. I find that I quickly exceed the formatting abilities of of the web app without getting into anything too fancy.

- Sheets is also okay for very simple things. However, my accounting department sends me a pretty simple traditional spreadsheet showing timetracking for my staff and it's totally unviewable in the web app. I'd rather just use the web app then firing up Excel, but I simply can't.

- I don't think I've ever bothered with the presentation app or anything else in the suite, but that's all I really need to use. TBH, it's actually a pretty nice suite that gets me about 70% where I need to be. However, all our internal tracking tools (Atlassian tools) really want documents instead of links to shared on-line docs so you end up importing/exporting everything as word docs anyways.

but I have to say I think that this (2nd, 3rd?) rewrite of sheets looks really good. I'm going to try it out the next time I need to deal with staff time.

That's interesting. We just went the opposite direction, from Office 365 to Google Apps and we couldn't be happier. Office365 was slow, riddled with issues and a poor experience for anyone who used a Mac. Literally awful; we often couldn't talk between offices on Lync because of "reasons" according to Microsoft.

Switching to Google was like a fresh breath of air.

> I can't assume I can right click and get anything useful, I don't know if I'm going to get the browser's menu or the app's. The concept of a consistent menu bar you can access with hotkeys is gone.

These are differences in the web UX paradigm, not differences in the capabilities of the technology. If Google wanted to build a web app "for people who were used to native apps," it could work and act exactly like this.

In fact, web apps built to work inside native-app containers (Adobe Air, node-webkit, etc.) frequently do do this, and it's quite hard to tell that the result is a web-app at all. See, for example, Light Table.

> I'd prefer that any money my company might be saving be deducted from my paycheck if it would mean they'd get off of Google apps.

Sysadmin here. How much are you willing to pay? I'll need at least 2 domain servers, exchange server, backup server/device/nas/tapes, etc to give you a stable and recoverable environment. I'll need an air conditioned server room/closet as well and a decent UPS. We'll need to pay for offsite data storage as well. How many people? We'll need CALs for each user. Licensing even for a trivial environment is easily 5 figures. Not to mention my salary.

I guess you could go with some shitty MSP and small business server, but not if you actually value your company, uptimes, and data.

Cloud services aren't big because they're good. They're big because they're cheaper than guys like me and all the stuff we work with. Your boss understands this. He's expecting you to deal with it.

IMAP?

I went from a fully MS Office company, to a different company that used Google Apps, which was recently bought by another company that uses MS Office (that we are now moving to). I've had extensive experience with both products at this point.

===Outlook vs Gmail===

Outlook has a lot of things going for it. One of my main complaints is the functionality difference between the PC and OSX versions of Outlook. Outlook on the Mac just isn't as polished and is missing a number of features that the PC version has. On the plus side of Outlook, it has much more powerful searching/sorting abilities. You can sort messages by a large number of fields. Searching allows you to filter on different fields as well. The big part of searching is that Outlook will do substring searching (gmail will only match on whole words).

Gmail excels at labels and visual presentation. As it is geared towards the basics that a user will need, a lot of data that you just may not care about is hidden away. This makes the bulk of what is important more visible. Also, I feel it presents long email threads in an easier-to-follow manner. Plus, once you learn keybinds in Gmail, it works the same on PC and Mac (which is totally different for Outlook). The other big plus for Gmail is proper handling of HTML. Outlooks HTML engine is pretty atrocious.

Calendars: both are pretty comparable to one another. Outlook is nice as you get desktop alerts even with Outlook closed (google can do this with the 3rd party apps). But Google is nice in that you can set multiple people as being able to edit/update an event, so management of events can be easier.

=== Word vs Docs ===

I'd say the only way Google wins in this is collaboration. Being able to work on the same document with multiple people at the same time is such an amazing feature, I'm sad to lose it. But at the same time, there is so much that Google Docs just can't do. So much advanced formatting, numbering bullets, and layout that it just isn't all that great at. If you just need simple documents, Google Docs can handle it, just don't expect anything too fancy.

=== Excel vs Sheets ===

Sort of the same argument as Word vs Docs. Collaboration is amazing in Sheets, but it misses a lot of advanced functionality and formatting. It's ok for basic stuff, but don't try to do anything to advanced.

Funny enough, in this category I feel Apple's Numbers is a really great tool. The D&D game I'm part of uses a Numbers sheet to handle characters, and one of the big features I like is embedding multiple tables into a single view (something Excel or Sheets can't do).

=== Powerpoint vs Presentation ===

Powerpoint again is similar to the Word vs Docs argument. Collaboration is the one main feature Google wins at. Google Presentation has 2 major issues for me: 1) it doesn't auto-resize text if you go beyond the size of the box (it just overflows). 2) layout of slides can slightly differ between edit view and presentation view, which can be very annoying.

I have to say that I find the gmail experience vastly superior to thunderbird with my work email. There is something to be said for having a server do all the work instead of my desktop.

Thunderbird is currently my #4 memory hog, behind java and firefox, on a computer that routinely hits 100% memory usage.

> Using a native rich application is always going to be superior to building a web app on top of a browser.

Depends on how you define "superior."

Word has a lot more features that Google Documents, but if I don't need them...

Personally, I am more than happy to use Google Docs over MS software. Google stuff doesn't take 45 seconds to load. Formatting rarely goes awry. It has the features need. I can access docs from anywhere and share with anyone and they don't have to install anything or even load an application to view it.

I do not miss using MS Office one bit.

I've had the opposite experience while working with a company of <200 employees and several locations needing to have a set of communication tools to efficiently collaborate in real time. We're using the query functionality in Google spreadsheets to automatically parse data input by a variety of staff through Google forms for meetings gathering people often through Google hangouts. We're also able to make instantaneous and ubiquitous changes to training documents, policies, and other items (e.g. procedures) without worrying about versioning or if an old photocopy of a policy is still be used. I can't speak highly enough Google apps in this type of environment. We seriously considered Office 365 (which seems to focus almost entirely on getting you back to the desktop) but the inability to real-time collaborate on documents (at least at the time) was the first of many strikes against that suite as a viable option. YMMV depending on what you need to do, but for fast-paced collaborative work I can't imagine working without Google apps.

Is it possible that maybe you're jus tnot a GMail power user? Given the choice between Gmail and Outlook, I choose former seven days a week, and twice on Sunday.

I wouldn't count on this: > Using a native rich application is always going to be superior to building a web app on top of a browser

I firmly believe there would be no "native applications" within 10 years of time.

Outlook is very easily the the application that I hate from bottom of my heart. You are correct that other alternatives are not that good either and that's why Outlook still lives on. Even in 2013, its search feature is laughing stock. It hangs all the time, takes up lots of memory, rules can't be other than presets, its ranking function is sort by date, it can't do spam, TODO list integration is mess, it blocks good attachments, it can't keep conversation togather, it screws HTML and even its spell check is straight from 18th century. If you look at release over release enhancements, it pretty much has remains same, as if there is no one really working on it. Outlook is a shame to human kind considering so many people has to use it despite of it being a pig.

I did think "Hmm, Google going into Bed, Bath, & Beyond? Or maybe a flexible display you sleep under?" But no such luck[1] :-)

I agree with you that 'naming' is not a strong suit here.

[1] I'm sure one segment of the Internet could find a use for a bed sheet that was also a display :-)

Ha, no you aren't. Has it always been called that? My first reaction to the submission title was "what in the world is google sheets?"

I almost always use the word processing part of Docs, and maybe 10% spreadsheets (and maybe like .5% presentations), but I guess I just always refer to "google docs", saying "make a spreadsheet in docs" if I have to be more specific (or "in drive", though I'm still resisting that for going less descriptive of what I actually do with it with the new name).

I propose Gcell for slang. It's quicker, analogous to Gmail, and vaguely reminiscent of Excel.

The name will make business conversations awkward to Kiwis. Maybe.

Yeah, it makes more sense than "Excel" to me.

Have you tried it? You select N rows, it then says Insert > N Rows Above and Insert > N Rows Below. I've never had any problems inserting rows, but perhaps I'm not using the product the way others do.

The one thing that really annoys me is that they don't have a keyboard shortcut for adding a new row. Now I always have to

1) Shift space to select the current row

2) Press the "right-click" button the keyboard

3) Press the down arrow 4 times to select "Insert 1 above"

4) Press enter

Or else I've to use the mouse, which is equally slow. It's really silly given that how often people insert rows.

Inserting multiple rows in Excel works basically the same way. Insert -> Entire Row inserts exactly as many rows as are currently selected.

It works almost just like in Excel. Select row (or 30 if you need them, "shift + space" is the shortcut, same as Excel) Then go to Insert menu (Ctrl + ⌥ + I) and then W.

Very easy and fast.

Not so different from features that only worked with Google Gears before, Chrome essentially being Gears, matured.

It's been years and still Google only implements offline mode in docs for Chrome? This looks shameful, but perhaps there is some reason that Google people reading HN can explain?

From what I can tell this requires a Chrome app from the Chrome Web Store. So it is not standard HTML5 stuff. Does Google intend to fully support non-Chrome browsers? This behavior seems to show otherwise.

Google can't force other browsers to implement features. If it's only available for Chrome, it is possible that the features they need are not available elsewhere.

The $0 Google Docs is correctly priced for what it offers: spreadsheet functionality for the lower 80% of the market that doesn't use advanced features and most likely wouldn't pay for a solution

I use MS Office occasionally at work but even that small amount of usage has me wanting to use Google Docs instead. -Someone has the Excel file open on the network? Oh, read-only for you my friend. Have to save? Better track down whoever has it open. -No revision/change tracking. Have to always be alert as to who is changing what and when. Often simpler just to make a new file and add to the clutter on the network folder.

I've been using conditional formatting for over a year. It was pretty buried in the options though.

They don't :(. Stick with the previous format if you need API support.

https://support.google.com/drive/answer/3543688

No, it is still not there. First thing I tried. :-(

I still find it bizarre that the actual files still aren't synced in the google drive desktop app. Instead they are synced and stored in the browser. I'm assuming this means you have to go into the browser and get the latest versions before you go offline, rather than the desktop app keeping you in sync. The desktop app really feels neglected, like it's a checkbox feature to compete with Dropbox.

Good spot - this is much better. I have to copy & paste values from CONTINUE cells now otherwise sorting is completely broken.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding... does <ctrl>-<plus> not work for you?

Because web? Can I open my LibreOffice documents from a new machine without even installing an app?

Obviously there are reasons to use LibreOffice, like you said. But don't try to pretend there's no reason to use Google's office suite over LibreOffice.

It is convenient. But I am surprised so many people are willing to put their business's data into a spreadsheet where they can't even get the native files. If this takes off it's going to be lock in 100x worse than Excel ever was.

For me: collaboration. For personal stuff, I can create small sheets and share with family. They will be updates instantly.

For work: we use google spreadsheet for a lot of different status reporting. Allowing multiple people to edit it at once (and view all the changes immediately) can be really nice for certain use cases.

Definitely. Though I often wonder how much Google's apps strategy is a direct-compete with office for now?

I have a sneaking suspicion it's similar to Microsoft's Bing strategy. It feels like Bing was created to annoy Google and keep them focused on search. Microsoft could afford to throw a few billion at something to keep Google out of it's bread-and-butter. It feels like Google's doing the same with apps.

Of course, given enough time to gain feature parity, both GApps and Bing could be true competitors.

Maybe because not everyone wants their spreadsheet with sensitive data on Google's servers. Also, I seriously doubt this thing is up to feature parity with Excel.

Because Excel is the backbone of how most organizations do "computation". For example, if you look at any financial services company, you will find not only Excel everywhere, but tons of VBA code in those spreadsheets which also turn around and talk to various compute clusters that they use (both Windows HPC server and LOTS of Linux). Excel isn't going away anytime soon.

power users. it's faster and has shortcuts that everyone has memorized.

privacy

Well, there's power pivot[0].

[0] http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bi/powerpivot.aspx

having worked at a multinational for some years where excel was the bread and butter: privacy, power features (e.g. tables, goal seek, etc), and custom-built (corporate) plugins are the three biggest reasons I can think off.

I've worked with one organization that uses Excel sheets to model product mathematics for gaming (gambling) equipment. They won't even use the Macintosh version of Excel since they can't be sure the math will come out exactly the same as the PC version, and the PC version is what has gotten them approved by the gaming boards before.

Call it superstitious, but they don't have the time or expense to sit there and prove that another spreadsheet works 100.00% identally to PC Excel. So now they run Excel in VMWare on OSX. There's irony there, but what can you do?