I've been writing software professionally for a decade - I wanna know where all these people using ms office are hiding - I've certainly never seen them.
Googles suite of tools have been first class citizens at almost every company I've been at.
Excel is so far ahead of Google's offering - or anything else in that space -- that it's ubiquitous. It's insanely powerful, and its power is accessible to nontechnical people. That's an enormous thing.
Remember, spreadsheets were the original "killer app" that got PCs into the biz world. They're still a huge part of everyday life for vast numbers of workers -- and not just in the midwest as you sneeringly suggest.
Why was this downvoted? With the exception of "HILARIOUSLY wrong.", I agree wholeheartedly. I also didn't like the comment about the "midwest". Is Chicago not a Global Alpha city? It has one of the biggest options and futures exchanges in the world and plenty of big banks/insurance/finance companies. And Mayo Clinic is one of largest and most sophisticated hospital systems in the world. Probably has a ginormous IT budget. But, hey, it's the midwest, right?
well other than being needlessly abrassive I would say it's downvoted (although I myself didn't vote on it) because
> it's ubiquitous
it isn't - as I stated elsewhere I've never worked at a company where MS Office tools were a first class citizen, while almost every company I've worked at uses google docs/sheets frequently.
> It's insanely powerful
maybe? I mean I think if you need powerful tools excel/sheets is never the solution - they are really good at solving simple problems easily - there are better fits for problems that need "insane power"
> its power is accessible to nontechnical people
very fair point - the on ramp gets nontechnical people to become technical, but it is _not_ easier to do complex things in excel/sheets than in a general purpose programming language. It's just more accessible.
> as you sneeringly suggest.
starting and ending with a point to make the parent sounds malicious when no malice needed to be interpreted.
I think I will go back and downvote now. It's simply not a conversation that warrants much of any emotional response. We're talking about boring tools here.
1. I don't think you understand what "ubiquitous" means. Was Excel present at all? Yes? Well, there you go.
2. There's no "maybe" about Excel's accessible power. You have a bias to coding, which is predictable here, but "just learn to code" is not the answer for most people who just want to ask questions of the dataset. Excel does this for them. So yes, if you need powerful tools, spreadsheets absolutely ARE VERY OFTEN THE SOLUTION.
3. The power available to someone who learned to code at 12 is one thing, but that power is fundamentally alien and totally unapproachable to the average MBA in finance. And consequently it's entirely irrelevant. OTOH, Excel with its host of data science add-ins is HIGHLY available and will allow the user to get answers without having to learn to code. This is power.
My comment re: "as you sneeringly suggest" was 100% directed at pknomad, who snarked that the only people using something as tragically unhip as spreadsheets were in the midwest -- i.e., out of step with the mainstream and tied to ways of the past.
I stand by that comment without reservation, but it wasn't directed at YOU given that it was a reply to someone else.
+9000 for this comment. So many times I have seen very technical people dump on Excel. It is the most powerful "mid-power" platform I can think of. Just the idea that you can "record macros", then review/edit is an incredible learning platform. I've posted so many times about the power of Excel. And don't me started about custom plug-ins. You can go crazy with it.
Could you clarify? In my experience most non-costal entities outside of education space do tend to use Office as opposed to Gsuite. I'm not passing any judgement about midwest vs coastal cities.
Could you clarify how you're getting snark from me? Just FYI - I didn't downvote you.
My observation is based on the fact that most companies in mid-west (even Chicago yes) use Office generally because they're migrating from on-premise Microsoft solutions. I'm not passing any judgements.
Cargill, Old Republic Insurance company, et al all use Office365 or Microsoft solution.
Excel is indeed ahead of G suite offering but my post never made any indication otherwise.
That may be true for more casual users of office suites, but any organization that uses spreadsheets as a computational tool that does analysis on which the business depends uses Excel instead of Google Sheets. Certainly this is the case in finance and banking. (I am not necessarily an advocate of Excel as a computational tool, but it is used that way.)
Sure, if you're a software company GSuite is good enough.
In our corp we all use MS suite. Once we've decided to track vacation in the team locally. So we've made a Google spreadsheet with like 12 rows and 365 columns for a year. It was running insanely slow, editing and scrolling it was painful. Also it lacks basic things which Excel supports since forever, I don't remember now but a lot of basic styling and formatting for cells is missing. And that's just for basic work. Import a millon line .csv file to apply a formula to it and then export - wouldn't even try in g-suite. (PS: that's way faster than creating and debugging a script to do the same thing on .csv directly).
Or do anything with the real world like manufacturing. Or interact with other businesses a lot like recruiting does.
And by "legacy" I presume you mean, "Have been around at least 30 years." Sorry to tell you, but the Walmarts of the world aren't so much legacy as established.
I’m a consultant for large companies, exactly one of the last 5 projects i’ve been on used gsuite. Throughout my career I’ve seen gsuite used at 3 of some 30 companies. Where do you get this idea that everybody wants and loves to use Google software?
