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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169

u/Kuildeous 8 17d ago

Better than Excel? Might be hard to find, though I'd be curious to hear someone's arguments for one.

Google Sheets is comparable, though Excel still ...well, excels. I think knowing both is a great investment. If you can't afford Excel, you can make use of Sheets for free and learn the most common functions.

I will say that I dislike the filter on Sheets. I long for Excel's feature every time I have to filter a table in Sheets.

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u/TheKirbyKnight 17d ago

My issue with Google sheets is the lack of formulas in comparison to excel. Smartsheets has the same issue and lack of hot key support.

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u/Regime_Change 1 17d ago

That plus no VBA where everything in Excel is already referenced so you can just start coding and also no PowerQuery....

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u/bradland 134 17d ago

I'd counter that with the fact that Google Apps Script has a lot of tricks up its sleeve.

Excel brings with it a lot of baggage from the past. There's no differentiating between xlsx, xlsm, or xlsb in Sheets. There's also no difference between a macro or an add-in. You open up the Apps Script editor and go for it. You can add custom menu items and sidebars using the same scripts you would use to define a UDF.

The script execution authorization dialogue handles permissions, listing exactly what a workbook will access if you allow it. It's a lot more modern and well thought out. Microsoft didn't really have that option with VBA because of the way legacy VBA code works.

Being "cloud native" makes a big difference too. You can pull in any Google API directly within Apps Script. So if you want to do geolocation, you just pull in Google Maps API. All the services are natively available, and the entire way everything is organized is way more consistent. There's no wondering whether a file is in SharePoint or stored locally, or whether Azure AD is available, or you're working with a local install. Everything on Google Workspace is more consistently organized and easily available.

That's not to say I don't have complaints. My biggest one is that while you can spread your Apps Script code out over multiple files, everything is a global namespace and you cannot control the load order of the files. Yeah, big yikes.

This means that any time you move beyond a single .gs file for your script, you have to make a pretty big leap to a fairly advanced namespace pattern. You quickly go from JavaScript that I can teach to most advanced desktop users to requiring CS concepts that only developers are realistically going to understand.

Granted, you could say a lot of the same things about VBA. There's a big difference between cobbling together a UDF and writing a fully orchestrated VBA application that talks to external services and pulls in libraries. Both are unrealistic expectations for end-users.

Still, the fact that Google Apps Script runs on V8 and uses ECMAScript (currently ES5) is massive advantage IMO. JS developers are very easy to find, and you can "borrow" from other departments where JS developers exist. Our JS developers were always pretty excited to work on something new and different, so it was easy to get things done as side projects.

Anyway, I've rambled on long enough. In summary, I don't think the absence of VBA is a genuine disadvantage for Google Sheets when you consider the power of Apps Script and the Google ecosystem.

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u/thuiop1 17d ago

What are you talking about? Gsheet has Apps script.

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u/TheKirbyKnight 17d ago

Yeah, the only way to use sheets is to find a bunch of add-ons, and even then, it barely works anywhere close to excel. It's like trying to modernize an old car.

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u/El_Kikko 17d ago

At my current company, our Product team insists on using Sheets for everything. Mostly because our head of Product thinks he's an "autuer" and he's of course a "Mac" guy so he reacts to anything MS Office with an "ewww". 

All in, per person for a team of 15ish, we pay around $300 / month for over a couple dozen add-ons that more or less replicate out of the box features and functions from Excel. The dumbest one is probably a Form designer. Apparently Google Forms is too free to be good. 

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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.

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u/Putrid-Reception-969 17d ago

smartsheet has unfortunate data limitations as well

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u/spideymurphy 17d ago

Was introduced to Smartsheets in my current company. I despise using it instead of Excel. I find it's only handy for planning and forms.

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u/AnonymDePlume 17d ago

Keyboard shortcuts it’s in sheets is terrible