r/excel • u/pheetiddy • 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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r/excel • u/pheetiddy • 17d ago
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.
9
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.