Google is just eating away at Microsoft’s Office suite and the latest update to its Sheets app means it can finally compete with Microsoft Excel.
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Now to be clear, while Excel is still the more powerful application, few people actually use it to its full potential. And that’s the point behind Sheets: few people need the hectically intense algorithmic power Excel can wield.
They just need to be able to do normal tables with budgets and projections. This is not to say Google doesn’t also have some powerful klout. A friend of mine, for instance, uses Google Sheets because it can query Google Finance and pull in market data, which is very useful in stock market analysis. According to its help page, the GoogleFinance function will let you pull in various attributes for a stocks.
The biggest factor of course is the fact that Google Sheets is free where as Microsoft’s Excel will leave a sizable dent in your wallet.
You don’t need individual licenses for each employee at the office who needs access to the spreadsheets, you can all collaborate on the same file at the same time. The latest update allows Google Sheets to be used offline (a big issue thus far) as well as an array of new features which are exclusive to them. All this for free, the word that is beloved by any company owner who is trying to keep costs down.
On top of that Google acquired Quickoffice a while back, which means you can make and edit documents from Word to PowerPoint and yes Excel via their apps — available on iOS and Android.
Whoever replaces Steve Ballmer as CEO of Microsoft will most certainly have this issue of the eggs laid by the golden goose that is its Office suite not being quite as shiny anymore.
Here is the latest release video of Google Sheets
