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This is the only part they aren't on caliber in most cases. I rarely hear Slides or Docs isn't as good as PowerPoint or Word (even though, at least on paper, Word and Powerpoint have more features).

It seems that the sticky moat is Excel (and to a lesser extent but gaining somewhat rapidly, the Teams integration into 365. Google has blown it on being the enterprise chat solution).

Seems Google could chase this to close this, but Microsoft Excel is just absolutely sticky




Word is too, at least for lawyers. A whole generation of lawyers has spent 20 years learning the intricacies of cross-references, page/section numbering, styles and formatting. While some of that is possible in Google Docs, it's clumsy and uses much different conventions.


Just to clarify, I do know that Word fills some niches better (through both feature set and inertia). I know there are universities that still send their post doc writing standards out as word templates and they don't always translate well to Google Docs either.

That said, I think Excel is the exponentially higher case and hardest to replace. The niches filled by Word that Google Docs can't fill readily are pretty small comparatively. Excel has grown to mean so much more than just spreadsheets. Its pretty much a first line database to a huge amount of the business community, and still relied on across entire industries to do work, from wealth management to accounting to payroll to inventory etc.

I have, upon thinking about it as well, to hear any raised point about PowerPoint vs Google Slides where PowerPoint does something so niche that Slides doesn't and its a deal breaker, actually.




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