Spreadsheets Trend — Less Formulas, More On-stage Analyzing

Google Sheets vs Microsoft Excel

Trieu Lam
Sheetsu
4 min readFeb 8, 2018

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Spreadsheets are the critical tool for every modern business. Whether being used for financial calculation or managing company data, spreadsheets allow business owners stay productive, optimize workflow and stay on track. For years, Microsoft Excel has been the obvious and reliable choice for business spreadsheet needs. Nevertheless, as software trends have been shifted to the Cloud-based solution and Internet connection is no longer a barrier, Google Sheets has attacked the market with many functional and convenient features better for business and especially startups.

So what’s the verdict in the Google Sheets versus Excel debate? Here are some metrics comparing Google Sheets and Excel in advance:

Price

Core Functionality

Google Sheets is one of Google’s G-Suite productivity apps and works almost the same as Microsoft Excel. All core features are in the free version. Google Sheets provide many formulas like Excel’s, from Autosum to Lookup and PivotTables. Google Sheets’s the best functionality is a fantastic tool for collaboration. In any version, you can share documents with different permissions, like View, Edit, and Edit & Share. Due to the fact Google Sheets is a free web app, a shareable link can be opened and used by other people.

Now Excel is based in the cloud; it’s easy to share workbooks with other Office 365 users, send an email attachment, or copy a link to the file’s URL. The free edition, Excel Online, is entirely cloud-based, and only needs an email to sign in Microsoft Account. Excel cloud-based app is expecting as responsive and smooth as the desktop version but it disappoints. It doesn’t maintain macros setup, specific connected workbook data and shape objects don’t function properly.

Mobility

Google Sheets is a cloud-based web app, so you don’t need to download it to your Mac or PC. By the time, changes are saved in real-time. Google Sheets is also available as both in Android and iOS app. It works on smartphones and tablets. All features are completely add-on including offline work.

Excel has fully-featured apps made primarily for smartphones and tablets. Workbooks saved in Microsoft’s OneDrive online storage app can be opened, edited, and protected from any of these devices, keeping versions all up-to-date.

Compatibility

In the Google’s G-Suite product set, Google Forms is a smart app that can be embedded or sent in emails and then can export data into a committed Sheet with customized columns for each field. Google Sheets is also compatible with Excel files and .csv files and can import and autoformat them with the correct output.

Business Application

Google Sheets is best suitable for small business or startups that need to act quickly with their operations and collaborate with other people remotely. The built-in templates cover core business functions, like invoices and budgets, timesheets and calendars, and team rosters. The built-in sorting filters help make it easy to track down and display specific types of data on a comprehensive spreadsheet, such as an inventory database with many different Stock-keeping Units. Moreover, the most successful features of Google Sheets is available through the Sheets API. With the API, you can connect Google Spreadsheets and anything else, like website, mobile apps, WordPress blogs, any APIs through Sheetsu app. It’s super easy and you don’t need code.

On the other hands, Excel suits for large, traditional companies who need to collect and analyze complex data. Excel must have access to executives who can help them automate it otherwise you could get stuck in complicated mathematical calculations. For mobile use, Excel is better for reading rather than editing or analyzing data. The sharing and collaboration functions are presentable, though not its primary solution.

Spend less time in formulas and more time on analysis and decisions

For many years, Excel has remained the go-to a spreadsheet for anyone serious about number crunching, but Google with its online Sheets products made a successful raid on the market. With the functional and convenient features fitting to business demand, no doubt, Sheets are the best choice for the small business purpose. Thanks to the tight integration with other system, Google Sheets can connect all kinds of data from other Google services. For example, you can translate the contents of a cell using the function Google Translate, or you can fetch current or historical securities info from Google Finance. And with Google Sheets API, you can update your app and website by just editing your content from Sheets. Google is a company that drives the changes, not like Microsoft that tries be up to date only.

It is the fact that any person or corporation requiring one productivity app will also use the whole set of others. We, nowadays, have less and less time as more and more is expected job-tasks to do. Therefore, the primary factors that should notify your choice are compatibility with any other process and programs you use, and business application to free yourself up for other tasks. Even the smallest businesses are awash in data now, so you need to spend less time arranging it and more time analyzing and putting it to work.

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