I wonder how much of a generation gap there might be here. I’m 40, also a software dev, and grew up learning Excel in middle & high school, then went to college late with younger students. Nobody I know uses Excel anymore, except one older GIS teacher who was generally old fashioned in everything. All of my age peers (like 98%+) have a strong preference for Google Sheets as well. (And the kids younger than that, well, I don’t think they really use desktop computing much at at all; it’s all on their phones and tablets.)
Part of it is that Google Sheets makes collaboration and version tracking much, MUCH easier, which was traditionally a huge pain point with desktop Excel. Having one single spreadsheet that everyone can work on together and is always up to date is a much saner experience than trying to send 10 versions back and forth across 3+ people. That’s super important in team environments, both in school and in the workplace. The Excel 365 online version somewhat alleviates that particular issue, but… I dunno, the Office collaboration experience in general still just feels really clunky and outdated compared to Google Workspace, especially in a workplace environment where stuff is always schizophrenically divided between SharePoint, OneDrive, email, Teams, and Windows network shares. You can never find the same file twice. Google Drive, being cloud-native, does not have this problem… everything is just there, neatly organized by team and folder.
And Google Sheets is totally free and available on every web browser. Excel still requires both a purchase and a download, has only limited functionality on a Mac (it’s a watered down version compared to the Windows one), and isn’t available at all on Linux. The web version is also watered down, both compared to desktop Windows Excel and Google Sheets.
I’ve learned and use both and am probably considered a power user compared to the average user, and I think the feature difference between the two is exaggerated here somewhat. Certainly Excel still has strengths, like certain chart variants and better sparklines and analysis tools and formula tracing and integrations with Access and other Microsoft things. But Sheets also has some of its own strengths, like easier web-based table and data lookup, a SQL like query() function, fantastic regular expression support, a rich scripting system and ecosystem of plug-ins and snippets, etc. Excel offers a lot of that by way of add-ins and tagalongs like Power Query, but for a long long time that wasn’t available on the Mac or Web. Again, a huge hindrance in collaborative team environments, when you can’t guarantee that your recipient/teammate can use all the spreadsheet functions you’ve incorporated.
And in any case, most casual users will never use the advanced features of either one anyway. In my experience, the spreadsheet fluency of the average home or office user never even gets near pivot tables, much less anything more powerful. It’s a glorious day when I see someone even use cross-sheet formulas and named references, and I cry in joy when I see an actual lookup or index/match.
For many database-like use cases, I think software like Airtable.com is a better fit anyway, combining Excel and Access into a simpler to ease (and beautiful) experience.
People try to shoehorn a lot into Excel inappropriately and end up with nested IF()s ten levels deep that’s really hard to read and reason about, when a dead simple database would’ve been better. It’s often just powerful enough for people to shoot themselves in the foot. I say Excel in particular, because that more commonly happens in Microsoft environments when your tools are limited by your IT department’s contracts with Microsoft. Web-based teams generally don’t have that issue and freely mix and match the best tools across vendors to support their needs.
In the end both are more then enough for the typical home user, but Google Sheets is a lot less of a hassle since it doesn’t require a purchase or download. Kinda wins by default there for casual use. And for advanced users, there are legitimate reasons to prefer one over the other. I don’t think there is an automatic winner there. Totally depends on the use case, licensing, integration needs, and of course personal preferences.
Sorry for the tangent, lol. I don’t get to talk about this stuff very much anymore, but I think it’s interesting…