I love G-Suite, and I use it daily for documents, sheets, and mail. I can do most things I need to do in sheets. That said, Sheets is no replacement for Excel nor is the performance on par for complex and dynamic sheets.
I suspect this is a general change over as a base solution for all employees. I'm sure there are still parts of Airbus that will continue using Excel, Word, etc.
IMHO this speaks to the fact that Office is overpowered (or bloated depending on how you look at it) for average employee needs; perhaps a cost savings issue too.
Frankly, Docs, Sheets, and Slides are nowhere even close to Word, Excel, and Powerpoint in terms of feature set and usability. Sheets especially, but even in Docs and Slides I'll run into things I can't do.
Where the G-Suite apps really shine, though, is in collaboration. If I'm working by myself on something, I'll likely do it in Office just because that's where I'm most comfortable. But literally everything I write for work happens in G-Suite (mostly Docs, occasionally Slides), because Google makes simultaneous, real-time collaboration easy and seamless. That's something Office is only just starting to figure out (and too late).
You're right about the feature set. But, Google's products are good enough for most users. The justification for all the bloat in MS Office was always "people only use 20% of the features but each person's 20% is different." Well Google actually did a pretty good job of identifying the features that most people use. I hardly ever open up MS Office anymore (it isn't even installed on my main work computer).
- Outlook.com instead of the [bad] Outlook Desktop Application
- Sharepoint online for a CRM
- OneNote online for a shared scratchpad.
The offline versions of Excel, Word, and Power Point have no online rivals but for collaboration Office 365 is one to watch. I'd even argue it has pulled ahead of Gsuite in the last year.
I agree with your critique. This is just a hunch but I don't think they are ahead:
- Outlook.com must be one of the worst web apps there is. Compared to Gmail it's just plain awful.
- Sharepoint is decidedly one of the worst pieces of software ever built, that is if you are a developer. If you are an editor/content manager then it is possible it's just fine.
I use Outlook.com as my main email provider. And I'm managing to convince people to move off've Gmail onto it because of it's streamlined interface. What do you find wrong in it?
It might just be a matter of preference but to me Outlook.com is an attempt to webify Outlook The Desktop Client, which was horrible to start with. But they made it worse than the desktop app.
An example: while searching in your Outlook.com "client" it enters a new state, the search state. When you are done searching there is a left arrow in the navigation panel which you can click to go back to the "normal" state of things. Awkward.
I'm a longtime Windows user, familiar with Microsoft user interfaces, but to me there is nothing to love about Outlook.com.
That’s interesting, especially as that’s not what the link you’ve kindly referenced says. Congratulations on being able to change the user agent - Microsoft is not you and has to support decisions it makes. I can see why there’d be little cause for them to perform Linux testing given the small market share. So, if you were Microsoft - and not you - would you rather potentially break the experience for Linux users, or not enable what appears to be OS/browser specific code that speeds up the experience? Again, calling this a deliberate slowdown is extremely misleading.
The Outlook.com app that just rolled out of Beta (and seems much more closely related to the work the ex-Accompli team has been doing with Windows Mail app that is also the iOS/Android Outlook apps) is rather good. It's probably still a few months until it rolls out to most Office 365 tenants, though.
Microsoft's problem with O365 is that they don't want to re-invent anything. Google has the opposite problem in that they re-invent chat a few times a year.
If you look at Teams or Outlook groups, they're just recycling features that exist already. The Office apps are getting better in the sense that they are getting closer to feature parity between the various versions of office -- but they are doing so in a way that will break enterprise IT.
office 365 is far inferior to google docs for online collaborative document editing. You can lock the doc in office, you get into situations where it's very hard to safely have people collaborate on docs.
I don't find this to be true. For the last 2 years I have been using G-Suite and recently went back to O365. I find the collaboration features in the new version to be on par with googles. Also the UI is better, the online feature set is better, especially for PowerPoint and Word. As for Excel the desktop version is still the undisputed champion but it syncs up very quickly with others who are editing the same document on their desktop with excel.
My experience has differed from yours. I've recently started using O365 for some client work. I'm really missing a few features from GSuite, that are important for collaboration:
1. Ability to reference a specific person in a comment (e.g. +DamnYuppie please add your thing here).
2. Ability to add/update TOC for a document
3. Comments being owned by whoever wrote them, so others cannot accidentally edit the text of the comment.
4. Ability to notified of and reply to comments by email.
5. Ability to organise documents within my own folder, without creating second copies. (In GSuite, a document is a single thing, even if different people want to organise their own folders differently.)
I also find the UI is hard to get used to. It's different from GSuite, which is to be expected, but it's also different from the desktop version of Word.
Of course I went through a phase of finding that GSuite lacked features that I liked in Excel, but the ease with which you can use Google Docs/Sheets/Slides across devices, and the super-slick display and interaction of the commenting and suggesting features, more than make up for those.
6 months ago at my last company they used office and we used office 365 to collaboratively edit some word docs and we had a problem where the docs kept getting locked and others couldn't edit them. this doesn't happen with google docs. if you have a big collaborative doc its a problem, or was 6 months ago. Did it get fixed?
I have used O365 to collaborate on a spreadsheet and the experience was horrible. We had about 500 rows and 8 columns and it would lock up or just crash on us. We were not even collaborating. We just shared the file with 8 people and were trying to copy data from one tab to other (within the sheet).
Google Sheets was a much better experience for collaboration.
My home computers are all linux and GSuite is perfect for almost everything I do. I could see the issue with excel for many people in accounting/finance/etc, but sheets is more than enough for things I do as I don't do anything complex in a spreadsheet.
At work I am forced to use windows and have to use Office for many tasks (including SharePoint - talk about a terrible product) and aren't allowed to use GSuite. If I had a choice, I would make the same decision as Airbus
I haven't used G-Suite in years so I can't really compare it, but I use Excel online (via Office 365) to collaborate in real-time on documents with other employees all the time and it works great.
For most uses, Docs and Sheets "work". It is extremely easy to create a basic collaborative table or document. So long as you aren't stressing the sync features, everyone is on the same page.
Where G-Suite suffers is in the random features that a small segment of power users swear by. The keyboard shortcuts aren't the same as what people learned in Word/Excel. There are many incompatibilities and rendering issues with the Excel and Word formats. But these concerns apply mostly to advanced users; for basic documents, letters, lists, and tables, G-Suite in 2018 works well
To add to this, WordML is super powerful. Modern .docx files are basically just big zip files. You can easily edit this and do some crazy things and MS Word will be pretty good about reflecting this in the editor. G-Docs can have some issues with modified WordML.
You can do some of these things in open formats like .odt and G-Docs will be better about this. However, there are still problems with things like pagination.
So overall, I think Docs is where you want to be unless you have some super niche use case. I don't have enough experience trying to do crazy things with Sheets to have an opinion on it vs Excel though.
For anything other than Excel, I actually vastly prefer Google stuff. Collaboration features and not having to worry about files outweigh the (small) downsides for me by quite a margin. Sheets is a bit of a laggard, but it’ll get there in another couple of years.
I think it might have been a Joel on Software story that talked about how when they did a review of what people actually used Excel for they found that a ridiculous number never went beyond "making lists of things".
By that measure, I bet that Google Sheets is likely overpowered compared to most people's use.
I try to keep this in mind when I see things like AirTable (and their recent big funding raise) - because it looks so "listy" and like something people would actually use [1].
Maybe the real differentiator is the ability to easily put checkboxes and pics in a row and much less dependent upon having advanced statistical functions, pivot tables, etc.
As I recall the study went a little farther. The majority just used it for making lists. The rest used 10% of the features, but it was a different 10% for each person.
>That said, Sheets is no replacement for Excel nor is the performance on par for complex and dynamic sheets.
I don't think anyone, not even Google, is saying Sheets is a pure replacement for Excel. That said, like 99% of people who use Excel could get by or do better with Sheets.
Excel is crazy powerful, but not everyone needs complex i-banker programmer level power for running a simple program management sheet. And that's the issue GSuite is addressing. Excel is a one size fits all solution, like a shirt that can fit both an infant and a 1200lb gorilla.
It is true that Sheets isn't as powerful as Excel. But it's a good substitute for 99% of users. And for people dealing with complex models/large amount of data, they should probably use a proper programming language (Python, R) and version control.
Google Sheet's limit of 400k cells sounds like a lot, that could be as few as 40k rows with 10 columns (probably lot of them would be dimensional). As someone who works with large amounts of data and business users, it sounds nice to say everyone should learn to code and query, but in practice the business users can get a lot done with a big spreadsheet with fewer errors and less training. I frequently hold classes to teach SQL, and even that is pretty tough for a lot of people to learn and do correctly.
Seems like preview builds only at the moment. Reading the docs it also seems a lot more involved than the Google Docs workflow of Tools > Script Editor > write code.
Keep in mind Microsoft had to some extent nerfed the non-Windows version of Excel, Word, & Powerpoint.
The hope was to keep people on Windows, but as people started to shift away from Windows, it makes it much easier for them to jump from the sub-par version of MS Office to other products.
I think a lot of the more complex stuff excel has historically been used for has appropriately migrated to better suited analytics and data analysis platforms.
I suspect this is a general change over as a base solution for all employees. I'm sure there are still parts of Airbus that will continue using Excel, Word, etc.
IMHO this speaks to the fact that Office is overpowered (or bloated depending on how you look at it) for average employee needs; perhaps a cost savings issue too.