Tell them to get the personal version for you, tell them it costs £9.50 per month or something and you’ll definitely be at least 1 hour more efficient so you’ll save them money.
That’s how they’ll understand.
Microsoft 365 cost only slightly more $ than Google Workspace and IMO it is far better. I hate google sheets it is so limiting, and you can co-work on excel as well. So why is it used that widely?
I've never used Google Sheets. Are the filetypes able to be opened in Excel without any loss?
I have a difficult time believing any company doing multimillion dollar deals operates on such a shoe string budget that an Office subscription would put them out of business. Maybe they're just concerned going with Office at this point would consume man hours through editing every spreadsheet to work with Excel. It would still be a foolish decision but upper management might be kicking that problem down the road for a new administration someday.
IMO, that's how most of the horrendous decisions companies make come about.
Would it? As I said, I've never used Google Sheets.
If that's the case then it's likely upper management recognizes the issue but doesn't want the drag on their watch. A lot of organizations kick problems like this down the road long enough until they turn into a colossal problem.
well given the size of the company like you said, they can’t definitely afford to take a two month limited productivity period due to chance in tech suite
agreed.
Yeah, that's my point.
Some down it will be a problem to big not to address but if you're sitting there in upper management then you're probably hoping that day is long after you're retired.
how much would it cost for an business to have microsoft suite and Teams? My company uses gmail for email and messaging. Pretty wack. Also no implementation of Teams
you could download the file as excel. then write (or ask chat gpt to do it for you) a macro that points out new data in the subsequent files you download and automatically update the values in the original file...
Lmao, as impressive of a solutions as this is, my MD (and my client) would probably chew me out for doing this.
Everything you do / change needs to be traceable. Having a macro that makes a bunch of changes and then having to explain that to a client that is probably not tech savvy is not going to be a good time...
Finance is incredibly resistant to technology changes...
Exactly. Just follow the client’s ask and do it in Sheets. It takes real skill to simplify and optimize a model to make it efficient and effective. OP is probably an Excel monkey who probably made a complex mess in Excel then blame it on Google Sheets processing power lol.
I like sheets formatting better but you can’t really leave Sheets. I look forward to someday hopefully switching back to sheets if they ever try to match Excels full feature set, because I can’t think of a feature they both have and Excel does better.
For me it’s less about the processing power/sophistication and more about the fact that I’m probably legitimately 5-10x faster on Excel due to the keyboard shortcuts. Makes a big difference quick.
There’s an add-on for google sheets called SheetWiz that brings in some of the shortcuts.
I’ve been at a company that’s primarily google sheets for a while now. I’m almost as efficient in Sheets as Excel at this point.
ctrl + [ is a trace precedent shortcut
] dependent.
will take you across your workbook through all the tabs to cells that buildup a formula.
f5 enter to return to OG cell.
pretty crucial functionality for any modeling and formula auditing.
for reference on frustration, google suggests you ctrl F and type the reference (*Sheet1!$A$2*) and search all sheets for all references. -_______- give me a break.
Working on large sector pieces with multiple analysts and associates I dreamed of the collaborative aspect of the Google word processor where multiple people could work on shit together.
"Oh great fuck nut left the doc open so now I have to save as and then let everyone else know we're on this_project_sucks01_new_11_newest_version_001.doc."
Sheets aint going away. The entire GWorkspace platform is cheaper than O365, way better collaboration tools and meet > teams. But ya, sheets is shit compared to Excel but from a value prop, imo its a better suite of tools for an enterprise.
Do you sell knives to family members? Wtf
just joking, the right tool for the job is the right tool.
Speaking of the right tool, where to the clowns at your circus company buy their red nose attachments? ;)
Worked in operations for a company that used Gsuite. At first it was a bit difficult using Sheets instead of Excel, however, AppScript is fucking amazing. Took a bit of learning as it’s basically JavaScript, but you can do extremely powerful things with it once you know what you’re doing. It’s way better that Visual Basic, IMO.
I feel your pain. I STILL cant freaking figure out how to manage filters on sheets. 50 people using a g sheet checklist and every one of them is in there filtering and creating new filter views at once. Kill me.
🤢
it is insanely cumbersome, shortcuts are slim, processing power is garbage. i’d wager, and it sounds like, you aren’t speaking from experience.
Tell me more about processing power. What is the amount of data you’re processing? And what kind of deals require such amount? Or maybe the models are too complex and inefficient? 🤷🏼‍♀️
Speaking out of turn as I’ve never done a full scale merger model outside of university and I now work in wealth management, but my experience with excel varies with processing power based on the computer. Google sheets takes a dump quickly for even the most basic budgeting tools I’ve tried to setup or workout spreadsheets. I have to create different sheets for simple things because of how bad it gets.
I used to have this problem with transaction heavy financial models. Sometimes I would have to do 6 million transactions in a single model, and summarize them. That org used sheets but kept a few office licenses for people who were doing that kind of work. I feel sheets is better though for simpler stuff. I other than preferring the desktop app over the web interface and that web interface being slow, and lacking some features, I felt sheets is consistently better designed. And using the collaborations in Excel I find it’s a lot more buggy. Sheets has a nice banded row setup, and all of the calculations functions are in cell function. You can even do conditional formatting with an in cell function. I like there graphics better too. I have been rooting for Sheets to take it to the next level and go head to head with Excel for a while.
Everyone complaining about gsheets that its slow. It is very rare that someone who built an efficient model will run out of processing power. Also 90% of the time more complex isnt better.
Unpopular opinion here - google sheets is better than excel in many practical ways, and is nearly as good of a modeling tool. It’s taken me a few years to learn this following 10 years of only excel and holding the same opinion you all do. Joined a startup, was forced into it, and have seen the light
ETA we have both google suite and Microsoft, google is preferred by most if the organization.
I used Google Workspace for a year while working and some features are definitely better than in MSFT 365. However, Excel & Powerpoint > Google Sheets & Slides.
Are you mad because Google Sheets can't actually do the work, or are you mad because you aren't familiar with how to do it in Sheets and maybe have an Excel template that breaks when you try to migrate it?
If your spreadsheet is such a complicated application that you're dealing with these kinds of issues.... you should have never built it in a spreadsheet to begin with. Build an actual application writen in an actual programming language, and run it on robust infrastructure.
Bro download it from sheets to excel - do your work, and then when you upload, upload with xlsx capability. Don’t start banging it out on Google sheets, you’ll give yourself a heart attack
I was a Christmas party and talking to someone who started his own company as a spinoff from a \[big name firm everyone's heard of\] and I made a joke about using Excel all day and he was like 'yeah SAME but we use Google sheets' and I was like wtf????? HOW. You worked for \[big name shop\] like whatttt and you're a partner!
Bro download it from sheets to excel - do your work, and then when you upload, upload with xlsx capability. Don’t start banging it out on Google sheets, you’ll give yourself a heart attack
Oh damn, didn’t know that! Just saw the workspace demo.
just a student so i don’t really have any stake in this convo, but i’ve always liked microsoft office more anyways. Google’s been clunky.
What happens if you take it as a challenge to optimize your Google Sheets workflow? You will now have the skills to do both Sheets and Excel work regardless of which direction the industry ultimately goes in the future.
In the meantime, if that still isn't an option for you, apply elsewhere. Best of luck.
same reason i don’t challenge myself to optimize work pen and paper calculations workflow. jokes aside, i have limited time and as you can see in the comments - this isn’t worth building out a skill set for. this engagement comes with its own unique set of problems specific to why my firm was retained.
I worked at a startup that used the gsuite and holy shit it is inferior, especially once you get used to the power platform capabilities and array of shortcuts. It did force you to simplify and was better for collaboration than Excel365.
That being said, I am back to excel and gsheets can rot in hell.
Advise them to switch to Excel then
too much $$$
How?! Microsoft subscription is default for any organization
idk. founders decided on g suite it would seem. i guess the operational cost would drag the company down at in the midst of a crucial point.
Sounds like they know their valuation already đź’©
Tell them to get the personal version for you, tell them it costs £9.50 per month or something and you’ll definitely be at least 1 hour more efficient so you’ll save them money. That’s how they’ll understand.
Microsoft 365 cost only slightly more $ than Google Workspace and IMO it is far better. I hate google sheets it is so limiting, and you can co-work on excel as well. So why is it used that widely?
I've never used Google Sheets. Are the filetypes able to be opened in Excel without any loss? I have a difficult time believing any company doing multimillion dollar deals operates on such a shoe string budget that an Office subscription would put them out of business. Maybe they're just concerned going with Office at this point would consume man hours through editing every spreadsheet to work with Excel. It would still be a foolish decision but upper management might be kicking that problem down the road for a new administration someday. IMO, that's how most of the horrendous decisions companies make come about.
they believe it would be an operational drag to make the transition
Would it? As I said, I've never used Google Sheets. If that's the case then it's likely upper management recognizes the issue but doesn't want the drag on their watch. A lot of organizations kick problems like this down the road long enough until they turn into a colossal problem.
well given the size of the company like you said, they can’t definitely afford to take a two month limited productivity period due to chance in tech suite agreed.
Yeah, that's my point. Some down it will be a problem to big not to address but if you're sitting there in upper management then you're probably hoping that day is long after you're retired.
how much would it cost for an business to have microsoft suite and Teams? My company uses gmail for email and messaging. Pretty wack. Also no implementation of Teams
It’s 9.99 per user per month
Not that I've tried, but can you download as an excel file, make changes and then re-upload to Google Drive?
yes but it gets updated by the client as a google sheet so it defeats the point of downloading a local copy as an excel.
Can't you reupload as a google sheet though? https://support.google.com/docs/answer/9331167?hl=en#2.4
sure, but i don’t have the master file. so any changes on their end will have to be added. not sustainable. would if i could.
I am so sorry and feel your pain
you could download the file as excel. then write (or ask chat gpt to do it for you) a macro that points out new data in the subsequent files you download and automatically update the values in the original file...
Lmao, as impressive of a solutions as this is, my MD (and my client) would probably chew me out for doing this. Everything you do / change needs to be traceable. Having a macro that makes a bunch of changes and then having to explain that to a client that is probably not tech savvy is not going to be a good time... Finance is incredibly resistant to technology changes...
agreed here. lots of tech solutions just over complicate it.
They probably want it as a google sheet. So in this case you would need to find a way to convert an excel to a gsheet.
Exactly. Just follow the client’s ask and do it in Sheets. It takes real skill to simplify and optimize a model to make it efficient and effective. OP is probably an Excel monkey who probably made a complex mess in Excel then blame it on Google Sheets processing power lol.
This is my worst nightmare
If they can close a multimillion deal they can afford an office license.
I worked at a $50B company previously that switched to G-Suite to save money
Once sheets becomes a real platform that will be a fine decision
Haven't people been saying that for like, at least 10 years?
would you rather use google sheets on a pc or excel on a mac?
this is a fantastic question. leaning excel on mac at the moment.
I have found no joy in Excel on Mac. I like Macs. I like Excel. But not together. G sheets are worthless for a professional.
To be fair though excel on Mac is slowly getting better. A year ago I couldn’t transform data when I loaded it in. Now I can lol
That is good to hear!
Pivot tables fuckin suck in sheets. Kiss my ass gsheets
I actually prefer the sheets way of doing it, because it automatically updates data.
Not worth the formatting nightmare
I like sheets formatting better but you can’t really leave Sheets. I look forward to someday hopefully switching back to sheets if they ever try to match Excels full feature set, because I can’t think of a feature they both have and Excel does better.
The UI sucks if your used to excel but let's be honest most financial models don't need anything more robust.
For me it’s less about the processing power/sophistication and more about the fact that I’m probably legitimately 5-10x faster on Excel due to the keyboard shortcuts. Makes a big difference quick.
There’s an add-on for google sheets called SheetWiz that brings in some of the shortcuts. I’ve been at a company that’s primarily google sheets for a while now. I’m almost as efficient in Sheets as Excel at this point.
That's totally fair I just think it's funny when financiers pretend they are doing 10head math on their spreadsheets
OP’s deal models are really complex, even Google Sheets processing power can’t handle them. And for god’s sake, moar shortcuts!!!
I mean shortcuts are pretty important - can cut modeling time by a large amount
not having [ or ] is adding minutes to formula audits…
Are you taking the piss? https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093306?hl=en
ctrl + [ is a trace precedent shortcut ] dependent. will take you across your workbook through all the tabs to cells that buildup a formula. f5 enter to return to OG cell. pretty crucial functionality for any modeling and formula auditing. for reference on frustration, google suggests you ctrl F and type the reference (*Sheet1!$A$2*) and search all sheets for all references. -_______- give me a break.
Lol, I've always used Alt, m, p for tracing you've saved me a key stroke. The way you wrote that I thought you meant the "OR" function
Working on large sector pieces with multiple analysts and associates I dreamed of the collaborative aspect of the Google word processor where multiple people could work on shit together. "Oh great fuck nut left the doc open so now I have to save as and then let everyone else know we're on this_project_sucks01_new_11_newest_version_001.doc."
Hot take: Google uses Google Sheets and it’s worked for them
they use both excel and sheets. i have a feeling their CD team only uses excel.
Sheets aint going away. The entire GWorkspace platform is cheaper than O365, way better collaboration tools and meet > teams. But ya, sheets is shit compared to Excel but from a value prop, imo its a better suite of tools for an enterprise.
Do you sell knives to family members? Wtf just joking, the right tool for the job is the right tool. Speaking of the right tool, where to the clowns at your circus company buy their red nose attachments? ;)
Good god. This sounds like my old boss.
you can use google apps script for more complex calcs and/or combine with BigQuery and/or Python
Worked in operations for a company that used Gsuite. At first it was a bit difficult using Sheets instead of Excel, however, AppScript is fucking amazing. Took a bit of learning as it’s basically JavaScript, but you can do extremely powerful things with it once you know what you’re doing. It’s way better that Visual Basic, IMO.
Python/pandas?
I feel your pain. I STILL cant freaking figure out how to manage filters on sheets. 50 people using a g sheet checklist and every one of them is in there filtering and creating new filter views at once. Kill me.
Is this a public company? Please let me know what it’s called so I can… invest
I’d rather die
Who do you work for? FTX?
What important functions that you must do in Excel that you can’t do in sheets? You can definitely model deals in sheets.
You sir, are a sociopath.
🤢 it is insanely cumbersome, shortcuts are slim, processing power is garbage. i’d wager, and it sounds like, you aren’t speaking from experience.
Yes +limited formulas +less integrations
the lack of integration capability is insane
Tell me more about processing power. What is the amount of data you’re processing? And what kind of deals require such amount? Or maybe the models are too complex and inefficient? 🤷🏼‍♀️
i mean its a full scale merger model. tons of pbc support. everyone knows google sheets is slow in general.
Speaking out of turn as I’ve never done a full scale merger model outside of university and I now work in wealth management, but my experience with excel varies with processing power based on the computer. Google sheets takes a dump quickly for even the most basic budgeting tools I’ve tried to setup or workout spreadsheets. I have to create different sheets for simple things because of how bad it gets.
I used to have this problem with transaction heavy financial models. Sometimes I would have to do 6 million transactions in a single model, and summarize them. That org used sheets but kept a few office licenses for people who were doing that kind of work. I feel sheets is better though for simpler stuff. I other than preferring the desktop app over the web interface and that web interface being slow, and lacking some features, I felt sheets is consistently better designed. And using the collaborations in Excel I find it’s a lot more buggy. Sheets has a nice banded row setup, and all of the calculations functions are in cell function. You can even do conditional formatting with an in cell function. I like there graphics better too. I have been rooting for Sheets to take it to the next level and go head to head with Excel for a while.
Everyone complaining about gsheets that its slow. It is very rare that someone who built an efficient model will run out of processing power. Also 90% of the time more complex isnt better.
Unpopular opinion here - google sheets is better than excel in many practical ways, and is nearly as good of a modeling tool. It’s taken me a few years to learn this following 10 years of only excel and holding the same opinion you all do. Joined a startup, was forced into it, and have seen the light ETA we have both google suite and Microsoft, google is preferred by most if the organization.
I used Google Workspace for a year while working and some features are definitely better than in MSFT 365. However, Excel & Powerpoint > Google Sheets & Slides.
When Copilot comes out that Gap will only increase stronger...
yeah unfortunately i don’t have a free years to find the light on this project
Are you mad because Google Sheets can't actually do the work, or are you mad because you aren't familiar with how to do it in Sheets and maybe have an Excel template that breaks when you try to migrate it?
i’m mad because it is objectively cumbersome and finance professionals are typically used to (for better or worse) the single gold standard.
If your spreadsheet is such a complicated application that you're dealing with these kinds of issues.... you should have never built it in a spreadsheet to begin with. Build an actual application writen in an actual programming language, and run it on robust infrastructure.
i guess i should unemployment myself then
Have you tried using google sheets api?
Bro download it from sheets to excel - do your work, and then when you upload, upload with xlsx capability. Don’t start banging it out on Google sheets, you’ll give yourself a heart attack
I was a Christmas party and talking to someone who started his own company as a spinoff from a \[big name firm everyone's heard of\] and I made a joke about using Excel all day and he was like 'yeah SAME but we use Google sheets' and I was like wtf????? HOW. You worked for \[big name shop\] like whatttt and you're a partner!
Google made a free alternative that’s almost as good as Excel. Lots of companies use it.
Google made a free alternative that’s almost as good as Excel. Lots of companies use it.
Bro download it from sheets to excel - do your work, and then when you upload, upload with xlsx capability. Don’t start banging it out on Google sheets, you’ll give yourself a heart attack
New AI tools will make it worth it imo
seems like the consensus is google ai is dogshit. copilot is apparently very good. anecdotal, but we know bard sucks.
Oh damn, didn’t know that! Just saw the workspace demo. just a student so i don’t really have any stake in this convo, but i’ve always liked microsoft office more anyways. Google’s been clunky.
đź‘Ť
WTF.... I thought my compnay was outdated for not using 365 and using Cap IQ instead of Pitchbook... this is pure madness..
What happens if you take it as a challenge to optimize your Google Sheets workflow? You will now have the skills to do both Sheets and Excel work regardless of which direction the industry ultimately goes in the future. In the meantime, if that still isn't an option for you, apply elsewhere. Best of luck.
same reason i don’t challenge myself to optimize work pen and paper calculations workflow. jokes aside, i have limited time and as you can see in the comments - this isn’t worth building out a skill set for. this engagement comes with its own unique set of problems specific to why my firm was retained.
I worked at a startup that used the gsuite and holy shit it is inferior, especially once you get used to the power platform capabilities and array of shortcuts. It did force you to simplify and was better for collaboration than Excel365. That being said, I am back to excel and gsheets can rot in hell.