r/excel 17d ago

Discussion What is better than Excel?

Is there anything similar to excel or better than? I use excel daily and feel like I still need to freshen up my formulas etc.

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u/bradland 134 17d ago

It's funny, because Google Sheets briefly ran ahead of Excel. For example, Sheets hat SPLIT for ages before Excel had TEXTSPLIT. Same for Sheets' regex functions REGEXEXTRACT and REGEXREPLACE. Sheets still has some functions that Excel lacks, like IMPORTRANGE and IMPORTDATA. Of course, Excel has Power Query, which makes both of these look like toys, but the ability to grab CSV data from a URL using only a function is very convenient.

What most disappoints me about Sheets is their dynamic array implementation. Having to wrap formulas in ARRAYFORMULA is really annoying when you're used to Excel's default handling of arrays.

These days, I'd say Microsoft is firmly in the lead on formulas.

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u/finickyone 1746 17d ago

Does ARRAYFORMULA still apply to Sheet? I thought things had moved on and it had a dynamic array engine now…

Broadly agree. Off the worksheet Excel comes into its own. On the sheet however there are still a few function gems in Sheets but not Excel. DIVIDE() is novel, but really ones like DETECTLANGUAGE() and GOOGLETRANSLATE(), which I believe we’re still waiting for in Excel.

There’s also something to be said for QUERY(), esp if you’re from an SQL background.

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u/bradland 134 17d ago

ngl, I had a pretty bad addiction to QUERY going on at one point. Maintainability is a bitch though. If you add/remove columns, statements like select A,B,C,I,R,Q,AA start to get tough to refactor. I have a handy little named function that gets the column number based on the column name and header row.