I feel pity when I work with outside vendors who have to use Google Sheets. Excel is the most abused application ever made, but its functionality is unmatched. Most of my work is in SQL and Python, but sometimes even I just dump data to Excel and work with it because I know it’ll get the job done fast.
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If you need the real thing, there is no substitute. But only 10% or so of our users required Excel. The rest just needed the ability to add, subtract, multiple, divide, and link so we gave them OpenOffice/LibreOffice.
These open source programs had the ability to open older versions of MS Office programs that the latest Microsoft versions could not. So I even installed it for users that had Microsoft Office.
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I agree with you, but in my line of work people are more reliant on “slides” than ever before. I wish we could move to more issue papers, singe-page summaries, etc…and I see some progress in certain areas. But slides still rule the day…and it’s the ugly ones that are “meant to stand on their own” and not be accompanied by a briefing. Which means you are cramming a silly amount of information onto them…it’s bad.
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I’m a director in a nonprofit, and it’s basically a requirement that “sending out the slides” be able to convey all the information that was in the presentation. Which is asinine, but it is what it is.
Basically the only point of doing a live presentation is to be able to handle Q&A at the end.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who has to go through this. Haha
I feel like this could be a whole study about how we have moved to wanting all the information simplified about to fit in a slide. But that makes the slides unreadable when projected, which then drives away from the whole point and they become bulletized hell on a page in front of everyone on paper. 
Most of the time I use Numbers, when I reach the limits of what it can do, I switch to Excel. It is pretty rare that I actually switch to Excel.
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I have been using ChatGPT through Bing and I have to say it has replaced a good deal of what I used to use Google for. But how much of that is Microsoft and how much is the folks of OpenAI?
I’ve concluded that a lot of the Excel vs. Sheets debate is about which one we’re more used to.
I too use sql and python for a lot, but work with people more familiar with spreadsheets. I used to think the same way about Excel. But increasingly, I’m finding things Sheets can do (that I find valuable) that are simply harder in Excel. Two recent examples: medians in aggregate functions (built in with Sheets; last I checked I would have had to roll it myself in Excel), and using regex in formulas, eg to reliably pull dollar figures and percentages out of text (built in with Sheets, seems to require VBA or just possibly some complex advanced filters with Excel).
However, to my initial point, this may well be because I am now much more familiar and versatile with Sheets, so I think of doing things that way; if I knew Excel better, the trade off might look very different.
AI is about to completely change how you use computers …
Not really. Old dog. New tricks.
In the next five years, this will change completely. You won’t have to use different apps for different tasks. You’ll simply tell your device, in everyday language, what you want to do.
Not really.
ME: “MS ExOrd (Excel + Word app) … generate a year to date summary of expenses on car maintenance pulled from my BoA account statements and tally it in a format to submit to my tax accountant.”
AI: “Yea. Sure. … a few minutes later … Here’s the report. I took the liberty to put it on your letterhead, added your signature, printed the report, ordered a priority mail tag envelope from USPS, and put a reminder in your calendar for two days from now that you should ship this out. And your vodka martini is being poured in the fridge for you.”
I find the further examples in the article are not AI as I see it. Rather they are AI as hyped to the general public. The “improvements” are simply expansion of improvements our existing tool sets such that they are able a) to recognize “natural language” and b) to parse other inputs for “next step” decisions. Perhaps the only smidgen of AI in these is the latter … parse a probability decision tree with greater finesse to provide a higher success toward an acceptable outcome.
However, when I would be a younger man (isn’t there a song about this wish???), I would be investing more time to explore the growing use of “AI” to compile summaries across large swathes of text input. Specific to my needs as a (science) researcher, feed in some N (e.g. N = 25) journal articles in a general research area and request a summary of the key goals, results, and as-yet-unresolved questions, all with targeted backlinks. All this is still not a true AI to me, but rather just making apps that are able to play with words and word-phrasings in the same way that apps such as R or Stata are able to play with numbers.
In any case …
My personal answer is … not really. I use a software tool because it makes my work flow easier. By specific example, the macOS desktop paradigm is far more intuitive for me to use than is the WindowsOS windows paradigm, yet for spreadsheet-like calculations, using MS Excel consistently provides me a lower friction UI than using Numbers. I also appreciate the ease of use of my iPad even as I am generally curious about not having the equivalent full touch-screen abilities to macOS as offered by a Surface tablet. I once ranted about the fun of “plug-and-play” (AppleOS) versus “plug-and-pray” (Windows/DOS), while today I lament the potential fallouts in software available for science research on macOS because the wide area of trusted code is “hard-wired” to Intel chipsets.
Finally, here is a counter question to play devil’s advocate …
“I wonder if Windows users are underestimating the value of Apple products …”
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JJW
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Can you give me some examples of things you can do with Excel but not with Sheets?
I think that’s extremely rare - and there are probably just as many things you can do with Sheets but not with Excel.
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I think that if you can decide which tools you use for your work then MS products aren’t really standouts of excellence, but if you work in an environment in which there is a lot of collaboration among a large number of people, especially if that collaboration is inter-department or inter-organization, then the ubiquity of MS products and their (generally) excellent integration is much, much more apparent.
As Mac users we often cite the tightly integrated ecosystem as an advantage: Microsoft tools provide something similar across nearly the whole business world.
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Yeah I was being a bit flippant, sorry. My wife runs an independent art business that I bookkeep and track inventory with Google Sheets so I’m really not a hater. Off the top of my mind, the pivot table features are much more complete in Excel as well as chart customization. Sheets definitely has cool features, I know a cloud tool I develop with at work called dbt Cloud just announced Sheets integration before Excel.
Print without having to click buttons multiple times.
Print without having to guess what and where the headers and footers are for each sheet in a multi-sheet layout.
Print without having to guess between margins in inches or cm versus points.
Otherwise, my frustration is less about the things that one versus the other can do. It is more about the more intuitive UI approach in Excel versus Numbers to do certain things (e.g. change a font size … one-click toolbar in Excel versus open format, open tab, find correct location to change text font size, click that button … in Numbers).
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JJW
I had no idea you could do regex in Numbers! That is awesome, it’s always a pain to handle $s and “,”s in Excel.
Apple has implemented AI In their products for years, what they haven’t done is provided a CHATGPT type service.
Are they a decade behind, not at this moment, maybe a year or two, but we don’t know what they’re working on behind the scenes.
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Companies want software that works (mostly) together which Microsoft provides.
Personally I don’t have issue with their software and find it fine and for the £50 a year can’t get 1TB of cloud storage for each family member plus office anywhere else. I find constand MS bashing tedious.
There’s a good discussion / monologue on this weeks ‘Sharp Tech’ about this very topic. Some people just want ‘one neck to wring’.
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$70/year for Office 365 Personal. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote. 5 devices. 1 TB of cloud storage.
This is the single best deal in computing. The apps are top level. Did I mention 1 TB of cloud storage? No one can match it.
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@rkaplan There are various complex functions that exist in Excel but don’t exist in Sheets. Of course, I can’t remember any right now, but I’ve run into this limitation a few times which is why I stayed with Excel.
It is also worth noting that I’ve had problems in the past with very large spreadsheets (10s of 1000s of lines) not running smoothly on Sheets. It’s better to have those spreadsheets stored locally and processed “on device” I’ve found, which only Excel (and Numbers) can do.
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