There are so many available work productivity tools, that it is hard to keep up. Microsoft Excel has held a fairly strong hold on the spreadsheet market for decades, but over the last eight or nine year, Google has closed the gap with more and more comparable offerings. As organizations allow more personal devices, both for remote and traditional workplaces, individuals may have different tools installed on their laptop. If you are looking to standardize your tools, you may wish to understand the capabilities of both Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel.
The good news is, both Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel are powerful spreadsheet options, allowing businesses to manage figures, make calculations, create graphs and charts, and much more. Initially, Google Sheets was introduced as a very basic option, but in recent years has added robust features that in most cases, will give Excel a run for its money.
Microsoft Excel
Excel is a full-featured, standalone application that has been around longer than the internet. It is a great option for calculated computations. There is a free version of the software – Excel Online – which is browser based, and has limited features. It was introduced in 2010 in response to Google Sheets and is basically comparable in function and capability. Excel Online stores files in the cloud on OneDrive. Access is only granted to Microsoft account holders. Excel is also available through the Office 365 subscription software-as-a-service (SaaS) tool. Features are essentially the same, but allow real-time collaboration.
Google Sheets
google Sheets was introduced to the market in 2006 as a free browser-based app. It has less of a feature set in comparison to Excel, but was designed to be more user-friendly than its predecessor. When it debuted, Sheets was not as powerful as Excel, but it has made progress over the years; allowing users to store files in the cloud (on Google Drive). Similar to the Excel rules, users of Google Sheets must have a Google account to access the app.
More Comparison Information
Google Sheets and Excel Online offer similar capabilities, but each product has strengths and weaknesses. Both provide autosave capability, HTTPS and encrypted data security and provide revision history. The main Google sheets advantages is that there are more integrated form and survey options, and allows you to create pivot tables, which Excel only allows you to use the tables provided.
However, The ability to customize the app interface is important to some business and individual users. If you’re one of them, then Excel (not Excel Online) maybe your best option.
Excel permits a user to add function buttons to a quick-access toolbar and to create new tabs on the group related functions ribbon. Excel also allows users to customize additional default settings (like the theme and the default number of tabs on a new spreadsheet), and add animation to feedback features such as pop up windows.
By way of contrast, Sheets offers fewer customization options, including whether to make documents available for editing offline and whether recently used templates appear when creating a new document.
Excel Online has no customization options.
When it comes right down to it, choosing between Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel may be a matter of preference. The differences are not so striking as to make one clearly better than the other. If you have already invested in Microsoft 365, Excel is part and parcel, as Sheets is with Google’s service. If your solution is working for you, chances are you are best off remaining with what you know.
If you have further questions or are struggling with setting up a comprehensive office productivity suite, call Alliance IT. We are here to help Sarasota small business thrive.
