Not at any of the companies I have worked for or consulted for in the past 5 years. At least at the Fortune 500 level. I love using new tools but Google sheets is nowhere near Excel for more complex projects.
That’s probably true, but in the most of the cases when it gets too complicataed for Google Sheets it shouldn’t be a spreadsheet at all.
KPMG consultants sent us a lot of forms built in spreadsheets and that’s an abomination that should have been a simple webpage.
I'm not going to defend KPMG, but spreadsheets are how things get done when you're in your cube and you just need it done.
Spinning up "a webpage form" in a corporate environment has A LOT of overhead and complications. It can't be done on the fly.
In many places, creating "a webpage" means putting up something on Sharepoint and possibly dealing with it's BOFH. That's a rabbit-hole I would not wish on my worst enemy!
You are definitely right, but there are practical issues. I have a very tight budget that never lets me invest in new tools. Our team has learned (well as much as you can learn) VBA to solve more complex issues in Excel because it's easy to hand a complicated spreadsheet over to a non technical colleague get feedback rather than have an application developed. I'd love to learn how to do that kind of stuff, believe me, but it's just not where we spend our budget dollars. There's also info security concerns, and yes, you can argue how secure is a spreadsheet, but a cool tool like Publisheet will never get approved because we'd be sending all our data server side.
Fair enough. I assumed everyone here was some sort of a dev, I haven’t installed office and refuse to install it. I just use the google services for any ancient documents clients send my way.
Consider that it's you who's missing out. Instead of thinking of MS Office as something non-tech-savvy people use, consider that Excel is the most widely successful environment for reactive programming and small-to-mid-scale data analysis in history. And despite its warts, it's good at what it does.
Ironically, it's also a powerful case of democratization of programming - I can't think of any other piece of software that allowed so many non-tech users to write their own programs. This created tremendous productivity gains, by enabling bottom-up problem solving at scale. Sure, for anything you do in Excel there probably is a SaaS available. But with Excel, you get to own your data, Excel is much faster than that a web SaaS, works off-line, you don't have to pay for it extra, you don't have to get corporate to deal with procurement and negotiate terms, and everything works together - unlike SaaS, where number one principle is siloing data and minimizing interoperability.
Google Sheets in particular is not a substitute of Excel for anything but most casual and undemanding of use cases. It's a heavy web app that barely works on cheap machines, chokes on complex data, and has nowhere near the UX/ergonomy of Excel.
The seemingly popular view that you should use whatever fly-by-night SaaS that's currently popular for your use case instead of Excel sounds to me like asking why would you have a fridge in your house when there's a dinner delivery service, a pizza delivery service, a fruit delivery service and an alcohol delivery service all available. Why own a general-purpose tool when you can subscribe to specific services?
I dont understand why me as a developer is using MS excel? or excel at all. I live in a JS world and my data is always noSQL/JSON or for relational purposes some sort of SQL.
I would never export a DB to crunch numbers in excel for a plethora of reasons. And for any statistical insight i would hope the service itself you are using [because i know you're not reinventing the wheel here] would provide you with the correct numbers with graphs you would have never even considered, simple example google analytics etc
Developers develop different things. Some are crunching websites or GUIs all day long, but others sometimes have some numbers to crunch (at or after work), or things to prototype. So YMMV, but I maintain that it's better to check out good tools than not, because sometimes you discover new things to do after learning how they can be done.
> I would never export a DB to crunch numbers in excel for a plethora of reasons.
You wouldn't, but you might want to connect to one every now and then to test out some ideas.
> And for any statistical insight i would hope the service itself you are using [because i know you're not reinventing the wheel here] would provide you with the correct numbers with graphs you would have never even considered
A service you're using provides you with insights they want you to have, and their time and scope for creating new features is usually limited to the "minimum viable user". If that's the only thing you need then you're golden, but sometimes you need to ask questions or do something with data that isn't offered by the service.
What I'm trying to say is this: Excel is to tabular data what Unix scripting is to text. A convenient and powerful way to solve a lot of problems in a small fraction of time it would take to find an off the shelf solution or develop a marketable-quality product. You're a developer, so you probably don't need it all that much (though sometimes using a spreadsheet really is faster than writing a script). But non-developers do.
