At the massive institution I work at, we recently went all-in on O365 18 months ago and are now switching to Google (over the next 12 months). So perhaps, but the room for change seems to be evident.
Word works best on Windows. Google Doc works best on Chrome. It's totally expected that if you go with the vendor's full stack, things will run better.
I've worked—at Google—extensively on documents using Google Docs on a Chromebook and the experience is pretty smooth.
O365 works great on Firefox in any OS. GDoc sucks on any browser that isn't Chrome. The most frustrating thing is that GDoc's is the only app I'm aware of that doesn't support right click / copy-paste from the context menu in any browser other than Chrome.
Microsoft’s Office Online (their version of Google Docs) has the same behavior on Firefox with right click clipboard functions as GDocs, unfortunately.
we did a similar thing. nobody can figure out why.
gsuite is cool for a couple hundred people, when you dont want to pay for office licenses for everyone. it makes even less sense when you already do.
there is a serious productivity delta between gsuite and o365, especially if you are like 90% of the other companies where Excel is king (no, sheets is not a suitable stand-in).
It's used very technically and often by people who don't view themselves as technically capable so the lock-in is enormous.
Not to mention that you can't do 1/4 of what Excel can do in sheets without writing a googleScript. Don't even try to open a 100 column 1,000,000 row spreadsheet (which are more common than most think) in Sheets.
If that operation happens more than a couple of times a year, the organization should have figured out an Excel replacement a long time ago. One possibility is that a human is doing something to each of some significant portion of those rows, in which case more data entry should take place earlier and closer to the business. If that isn't the case, then just write a damn report already!
Actually there is one more possibility, that one or more goofballs in accounting just like to waste time "looking over the numbers and getting a feel for them". This generates lots of spurious questionably-motivated inquiries to business and IT people (who always blame the other party, when only accounting is to blame for their own vague feelings). In that case don't worry about fixing anything at the company, just get a different job somewhere else.
Clearly you are not a power excel user. Excel is brilliant for such tables. The charting,manipulation, etl, and dramatic query functionality are astounding. In the right hands you can do truly amazing things.
That said, there are some great cloud analytics offerings which are going to compete.
Let's stipulate that excel gives you all the chart-formatting crap you need. Is that a reason to pull in a million rows, which is what GP is about? Surely a chart with a million things displayed is going to be awful, no matter how well formatted. A simple shell script could save these users hours of work, every time they touch this godawful sheet. Actual analytics tools would be even better.
Why would you do any of that when it opens up fine in Excel? A chart doesn't display a million things, it summarizes it. End users aren't going to be pumping stuff through shell scripts, and I personally am not in the business of writing office suite software. If people can get what they want, easily without my intervention by paying MS I am all for it. Also I don't want to support the sales department when my bash script streaming their stuff to Spark fails.
The truth is that Excel is easier to learn than programming. Call it 'graphical programming' if you will, but Microsoft did build a very powerful piece of software that performs fantastically great for many data tasks. And many many 3rd parties built extensions (data import, cleanup/statistics, formulas and logical programs) that Just Work.
I live mostly in a land of Unix pipes and vim, but I get it. Excel is a low-abstraction (everything is visualized!) graphical programming environment that the business world loves.
But the excel replacement is a 3 year IT project with a 60% chance to fail and an enormous budget. By the time it is done, the user will have forgotten what this project was even for.
Software development in large corporates is just too slow, costly and unreliable.
Part of the promise of cloud based document solutions, to my eyes, is being able to replace "edge databases" with user-facing user-editable spreadsheets.
Drain those IT projects of risk, get moving early, with a structure that lets the user guide the data modelling... Could be a nice local minimum :)
Agree. Well, ideally you would want to give a path for non technical users to do more than spreadsheets. That was the promise of hyper-card, VBA, etc. But that's not the direction of the world anymore, quite the opposite.
Nowadays you have JS to automate Google and MS docs, but 1) Javascript is kinda warty for VBA-type users, 2) API driven javascript is less friendly than the locally-logical VBA-style access, and 3) the mental barriers to entry are much higher than older solutions to the same issues...
In theory we should be approaching data-nirvana for end users. In reality it takes a lot of tech know how to bridge those gaps in the modern Enterprise and you're getting almost no help from the big boys.
Empirically we buy a company, tell the accounting team that we are changing to gsuite and see if the CTO gets fired, or the accounting team quits, or the company gets a hit.
I'd leave a moderately-sized (like 5 pages) work gdoc page open on my work machine at Google and come back the next day and it was using 1gb of RAM. Fantastic is certainly one word for it.
Collab tools are fabulous no doubt, but sheets feels entirely neglected and basic.
Permissions model is clunky and gsuite governance is nonexistent - you have to buy a CASB license to do anything effectively.
It's not a bad suite, I just think it's confused on some areas (don't even get me started on the chat/conference systems tho)
One issue currently preventing our move is the lack of a true desktop app. Sometimes you just need the native windows experience instead of your browser taking up even more ram to open a spreadsheet.
Libreoffice and Sheets are both dead in the water non starters for all of the finance guys that I know.
The ability to open a million line csv file with 75 columns and execute a search and replace without leaking battery acid out of every orifice in your machine.
The hundreds of long complex well vetted plug ins that are drop and play with Excel which serve niche hard to reason about corners of regulation legalese. There has been so much cross pollination between the major firms that everybody has these tools and implements their own little tweaks.
The ability to quickly spin up a VBA macro to do some heavy lifting in a client provided 250 worksheet workbook each with 50000 line items (none escape quoted so every address with a comma in it malformed the data on client export).
That is my experience too, and I also find LibreOffice to be much faster than Excel for huge datasets. The biggest difference for me is clearly file compatibility and that is why I still use mostly Excel.
WHAT? CSV support in Excel is just completely broken. Million line CSVs are the only reason I have LO on my machine.
If LO would just make .xlsx a native format, they could probably take some market share from Excel. But, as long as there are little issues with interoperability, 100% of the world will be on Excel. Alas.
For me personally, sheets is fine although slow. For our finance people, vba and dynamics GP integration is a requirement.
We switched from o365 to gsuite in the last year, and have run into some things that make it feel like gsuite isn’t quite polished as a business product. Examples off the top of my head:
- Can’t share individual folders from a team drive. Not a dealbreaker, but hobbles g drive as a Dropbox replacement.
- Email to a suspended user bounces. In exchange, the mail goes through but access is cut off.
- inviting a google group to a meeting doesn’t work as smoothly as inviting an exchange group
- can’t delegate account access administratively, need to do it from the user account
There are big pluses too, and overall I’m not sad we switched. But it feels like MS has a much better handle on what corporate IT needs.
Desktop email clients like Outlook let you do things such as: select all email messages -> save as .txt -> feed the .txt to a python script that extracts useful data.
If we were using GSuite I guess we could use the Gmail API to get the message body data, but at the end of the day having local access is just more convenient (edit: faster).
Edit: for everything else that is not email (spreadsheet, word processor, presentations) there are also similar advantages related to having full fledged desktop applications.
We do clustering on unstructured text and we output data in a Jupyter notebook. It's a proof of concept for now and the production pipeline will be a bit different. The whole Python ecosystem is awesome for this type of prototyping.
The answer to this is fairly simple: Offline access to email. You need a client for this, and an arbitrary browser won't do.
Solved problem on iOS and Android with whatever mail app you want to use, but those are of course apps.
Solved problem on the PC with Outlook or "Gmail Offline", but "Gmail Offline" is a chrome-only feature so is, as far as I'm concerned, an offline email client built into Chrome, not a feature of Gmail per-se. See also: Any IMAP mail client.
