I’ve never really used the Google Apps (Word Processor, Sheets, Presentation software), and I was wondering how they work on a Mac from anyone who has used them a lot.
I’m a power user of Sheets, including Apps script, web apps etc. I have Chrome installed on my Mac purely for Sheets. Sheets is an utter mess on Safari in terms of the way it renders, goes wonky. I use Safari for everything else.
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I have had good success with Google Docs and Google Sheets on my Macs as long as I use them with a Chromium-based browser. I’ve been using Vivaldi for the past while and have used Docs to write a manuscript with scattered collaborators. It worked well, including the Zotero extension for reference management.
I been using Docs and Sheets almost exclusively for about 6 years. No one, AFAIK, at my last company used presentation graphics so I have no experience with Slides.
I run Google Workspace in Google Chrome and use Safari for everything else. The apps run on Mac the same as Windows and ChromeOS, and I had very few problems moving from LibreOffice/MS Office apps to the Google equivalents. Gemini Personal Intelligence is rolling out so that will something new.
Google has some guides online and there are plenty of tutorials on YouTube.
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We use them a lot to collaborate on things at work. As everyone else said, I use them mostly in Chrome. If I need to do any serious spreadsheet work, Sheets just doesn’t cut it. So it might start out in Sheets and then I’ll export to Excel when I need the power of Excel.
I almost never use Word, Docs does almost everything I need from a word processor.
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Yes, there will always be certain instances where Excel is the right tool – massive datasets, heavy financial modelling, Power Pivot etc. But Sheets shouldn’t really be maligned in a forum like this, and that’s coming from someone very comfortable with Excel and Power Query.
Sheets has full function parity with Excel for the vast majority of real-world use cases. What’s often overlooked, though – and far more interesting to MPU folk – is the ecosystem around it.
Apps Script turns Sheets into a programmable system: API integration, scheduled triggers, web apps, doGet / doPost endpoints, webhooks, and lightweight services that sit happily in the cloud. For example, with Apple Shortcuts I can send and retrieve data from live spreadsheets simply by calling a deployed web app – effectively treating Sheets as an API backend. So we are now moving into the territory of building data pipelines and automation systems, with all this fanning out from Sheets.
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Google’s apps are pretty good for day-to-day purposes, certainly for most personal and small business uses —I run a local charity entirely in a Google Workspace.
To avoid Chrome, I’ve been using a third party app wrapper called Kiwi for Gmail, “been” being the operative word as their subscription is changing and, good as it is, it may not be worth the candle at renewal time. In my quest for cross platform apps, I’ve been trying RAMbox, essentially Chromium based browser with with “workspaces” for different account/ sets of web apps and tabs within each workspace (that appear as buttons) that let you easily switch between web apps. Gets rid of the search/URL bar and all the rest of the typical browser gubbins. I would have stuck with the Arc browser, which has similar workspace features, but it’s no longer a priority for its authors.
I’ve set up a workspace in ARC for all of my Google apps, some of which I use extensively (Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Contacts) and some of which I need to dip into a couple of times a week (e.g., Sheets and Docs). ARC is a chromium browser, and I think the apps are more at home there than in Safari.
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Anything word or excel can do, Google sheets can do it too. Some things like importing live data from url or forex rates it can pull off the internet in real time. It can import data between spreadsheets easily. AI is coming to Google workspace for free when Microsoft & Apple want to charge for it. Collaboration, nothing is better than Google docs. Try it, i will say you will not be disappointed. Definitely use a chromium browser, if your document or spreadsheet has a large volume of data then other browsers will crash the tab but chrome does keep going if you can stomach it’s drawbacks.
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The one drawback i see is, styles and structures get messed up if you need to send people files in other formats, if that’s your use case then Google suite is not for you.
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