Microsoft Excel vs. Google Sheets: The Great Spreadsheet Debate

Google Sheets, Excel, and Excel Online perform similar functions, but each has strengths and weaknesses. In general, Excel has more functions than Sheets or Excel Online, such as advanced conditional formatting and the ability to track dependencies, as well as more robust graphs and picture creation options. Sheets is known for having a simpler interface than Excel and, to a lesser extent, Excel Online.

In the following chart and paragraphs, you’ll find information on the features in each tool. For the purposes of this chart, Excel includes Office 365, while Sheets and Excel cover the respective mobile apps.

The ability to customize the app interface is important to some users. If you’re one of those people, then Excel is probably the way to go.

• Excel allows you to add function buttons to a quick-access toolbar and to create new tabs on the ribbon to group related functions. Excel also allows you to customize more default settings (like the theme and the default number of tabs on a new spreadsheet), and feedback with animation (e.g., pop-up windows appear to grow rather).
• Sheets has only a couple of options, including whether to make documents available for editing offline and whether recently used templates appear when creating a new document.
• Excel Online has no customization options.

Macros are recorded scripts that allow you to repeat a series of steps, such as importing a .csv document, changing the font of the column headers, adding sums at the bottom of each column, then saving the document to a shared drive. Many users create macros by recording the steps they want to reuse. Macros are stored in a scripting language that advanced users can edit; they can also create original macros in the language.

Excel has included macros since it first launched in 1987, using the scripting language Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). You cannot create macros in Excel Online.

Google Sheets launched macros in 2018, using a language called Google Apps Script (which is based on JavaScript).

Excel Online can open Excel documents that contain macros, but you can’t use, edit, or delete the macros.

Because Excel and Sheets use different languages, macros created in one app won’t work in the other.

Due to its long history with macros, as well as its extensive support documentation and expertise, Excel is the better option if you use a lot of macros. If you are an occasional macro user, any of the apps will likely meet your needs.

Excel, Excel Online, and Google Sheets all support charts, but differ in the types of charts they work with and their customization options.

Overall, Excel offers the most chart types, followed by Sheets (Google is working to close the gap with Excel), and lastly Excel Online. All applications include common chart types, such as bar, column, pie, line, scatter, and area charts.

Some of the differences are explained below:

• Sheets has two Scatter Plot charts, Excel has seven, and Excel Online has five.
• Sheets and Excel allow the creation of sparklines, but Excel Online doesn’t (it displays them if the spreadsheet was created in Excel, but converts them to noneditable images).Sparklinesare small line graphs that appear in a cell next to the data.
• Excel and Sheets have histograms, but Excel Online doesn’t.
• Excel offers the most chart customization options.
• You must create flow charts and Gantt charts manually in all three apps.
• Excel has a recommended charts feature, which changes based on the data you select.
• Excel offers combination charts, which combines two chart types into one.

Charts you create in one app might display correctly in the others, but there’s no guarantee. If someone sends you spreadsheets with charts, it’s best to open them in the app in which they were created.

Excel, Excel Online, Office 365, and Sheets allow multiple users to share documents, but each app handles sharing differently.

Because the apps store documents on the cloud, sharing is built into Sheets and Excel Online.

Users of the standalone Excel app can share documents that are stored on a shared drive like OneDrive or SharePoint. Otherwise, users have to download and email them, thus creating multiple copies and potentially leading to issues with version control.

All versions of Excel and Excel Online allow you to share documents with users who don’t have a Microsoft account. They view it through their browser if they don’t have Excel.

Likewise, Sheets allows you to share documents with users who don’t have a Google account.

In real-time collaboration, multiple users interact with the same document at the same time. This is a powerful feature for team projects and documents that require input from multiple parties.

Collaboration is built into Google Sheets. A different-colored cursor indicates what cells other users are working in, but you can’t immediately see who made changes.

Excel Online also has collaboration built in: Users can see others’ work and who made which changes.

Users of the standalone Excel app can’t host aco-authoringsession(Microsoft's term for real-time collaboration).

Excel Online users, Office 365 subscribers with the latest version of Excel, and iOS and Android app users can host co-authoring sessions, but under a number of conditions:

• Office 365 subscribers, Excel Online users, and users of the iOS or Android apps can be co-authors.
• Users of the standalone Excel app can be co-authors as long as they have Excel 2010 or higher.
• Depending on what version and platform each person is using, the host may not be able to see what others are doing in real time, though their changes will appear.
• Because of the variances in available functions, features, and charts between versions, users may not be able to properly view all documents on which they are collaborating.

Sheets and Excel Online have built-in chat windows that users can access during collaboration.

Keyboard shortcuts are convenient for both advanced users and people with basic spreadsheet needs. These include the function keys across the top of the keyboard, as well as combinations using the control key (Windows) or command key (Mac).

In Excel, the shortcuts available vary based on the version of the program. In general, the newer the version, the more shortcuts. Excel Online also supports keyboard shortcuts. The current version of Excel has about 200 shortcuts (there are fewer for Macs). The full list is available via Excel’s or Excel Online’s help menu.

Google Sheets supports about 160 keyboard shortcuts for Windows and slightly fewer for Macs. See the listhere. To use the full list, you must change a browser’s default settings (instructions are at the end of the list linked in the previous sentence).

The Excel and Sheets mobile apps support some shortcuts when the keyboard in use has the right modifier keys.

Because Sheets and Excel support macros, when a keyboard shortcut is not available for a particular action, users can create their own.

What are some good uses for spreadsheets?
Spreadsheets can be used for a variety of tasks, from complex calculations (for example, a financial controller predicting a company's profitability based on fluctuating variables or calculating a factory's power usage) to simpler tasks (such as a person managing their record collection or to-do lists). More common tasks include the following:

• Analyzing statistics
• Creating custom budgets
• Creating mailing lists
• Creating small-business invoices
• Documenting standard operating procedures
• Generating code, keywords, and lists
• Keeping records
• Managing personal finance
• Managing projects
• Storing, sorting, analyzing, and filtering data
• Tracking household budgets
• Tracking inventory
• Tracking time worked

To open an Excel document in Sheets, you must first upload it to Google Drive. Open Google Drive, clickNew, clickFile Upload, and select the document. Then open Sheets and choose one of the following options:

• To edit the document, clickFile, clickImport, then select the document.
• To view the document, clickFile, clickOpen, then select the document. If you change your mind about editing, click the “Open with Google Sheets” button.

To open Google Sheets documents in Excel, you first have to export the document from Google Sheets and save it to an Excel-accessible location (such as your hard drive). In Google Sheets, clickFile, clickDownload as, clickMicrosoft Excel (.xlsx), and choose where to save it. Then open Excel, clickFile, clickOpen…, and select the document you saved.

Some formatting may not transfer over, and charts or functions that aren’t supported by Excel Online won’t work.