> It’s fine as a replacement for Word (I guess? I’m not much of a Word user).
Google Docs is to Word what Google Sheets is to Excel in terms of functionality. As long as what you're doing is simple, it's fine, and if what you're doing requires collaboration, it's great. But when you want to do something remotely complex, Docs and Sheets largely get their asses handed to them by Apple's free iWork apps, let alone Microsoft Office.
Two things make Google Sheets infinitely more useful than Excel to me on a daily basis:
- Regex support in find & replace and regexextract().
- FX rates as a formula instead of as a data type. IIRC Excel requires 2 columns to display a FX rate (one to specify the pair, one to print the number); Google Sheets specifies the pair inside the formula.
I mean, you're right, no one at Goldman Sachs is using Google sheets unless it's to get everyone's lunch orders together. (Hell, I bet Google's finance team uses Excel.) But most of us don't work at Goldman and don't do anything remotely complex. I would guess that 90% of Excel users fall into this category and that's who Sheets is for.
I don't know any huge, non-tech companies (insurance, commercial banks, investment banks, heavy industry, auto manufs, etc.) that use the Google ecosystem (office & mail). I'm sure all of them use Microsoft Exchange (slowly moving to MSFT cloud), instead of GMail. If someone knows any good exceptions, please share!
I think the big transition at PWC was 5 years or so ago I think, but to this day every document I get from them is Excel / Word. Despite how much work went into those accounts - these are not complex spreadsheets either!
Google Docs is to Word what Google Sheets is to Excel in terms of functionality. As long as what you're doing is simple, it's fine, and if what you're doing requires collaboration, it's great. But when you want to do something remotely complex, Docs and Sheets largely get their asses handed to them by Apple's free iWork apps, let alone Microsoft Office.