Backstory

My previous employer moved from Microsoft Office to G Suite in the summer of 2019.

At first, I hated it. Excel was one of my best work tools. I knew the shortcuts, could move quickly, and had built enough models that taking it away felt like losing a language.

Then I used Google Sheets every day for two years and slowly came around.

I still like Excel. But for a lot of real business work, especially shared reporting and lightweight automation, Sheets is better than people give it credit for.

Where Sheets wins

Formulas

IMPORTRANGE, REGEXMATCH, REGEXEXTRACT, REGEXREPLACE, QUERY, and INDEX/MATCH/MATCH can make a workbook feel more like a small database than a static spreadsheet.

Google Workspace integration

Sheets connects cleanly to Slides, Docs, Forms, Gmail, and Drive. That matters when the work needs to move between people instead of living on one person’s desktop.

Automation

Google Apps Script is easier for me to reach for than VBA. JavaScript is more useful outside the spreadsheet, triggers are simple to set up, and a small script can remove a lot of repetitive work.

Version history

You can see what changed, who changed it, and when. That alone saves a lot of “which file is the real file?” pain.

Collaboration

The live shared file is the master file. No email chains full of final_v7_REAL.xlsx attachments.

File structure

A URL-based workbook is easy to reference from another workbook. With IMPORTRANGE, QUERY, and lookup formulas, you can separate raw data, models, and reports without making the whole thing impossible to maintain.

Where Excel still wins

Shortcuts

Sheets has shortcuts, but I still miss the full Excel keyboard workflow. ALT-key muscle memory is real.

Scale

Sheets has cell limits, and poorly built models can get slow. If the data is huge or the model needs heavy local manipulation, Excel still has a place.

Deep modeling habits

Some finance/modeling workflows were built around Excel for a reason. I am not pretending Sheets replaces every one of them.

Where I landed

For shared reports, lightweight databases, recurring workflows, and automation, I usually reach for Google Sheets first.

For heavy modeling or quick local data work, Excel still earns its keep.

The lesson was not that one tool is always better. The lesson was that I was mad about losing shortcuts before I understood what Sheets made possible.