The web experience of Word, Power Point and Excel, are appalling. Laggy, resource hogs. Excel & Power Point are damn near unusable on anything complicated.
And the group editing in those products...! Every time we've edited Excel sheets with more than one person it quickly restored in unresolvable merge conflicts and forked files. This has always worked beautifully in Google Sheets.
From what I've heard, the sync works well when everyone's using the same kind of client (eg. desktop, or web app). If they get mixed things become slowwe to update and have a decent chance to quickly go to hell.
They're nice in a pinch, but I advise folks to think of them primarily as viewers. In my experience, for any serious work you'll want to use the native apps.
> In my experience, for any serious work you'll want to use the native apps.
Don't you see how absurd that is in 2023? It's like me saying "Online shops are nice in a pinch, but I advise folks to think of them primarily as viewing goods. In my experience, for any serious shopping you'll want to visit the bricks and mortar shop"
I understand that POV, but I should temper my "serious work" statement by saying that the Office web apps are pretty great and keep getting better. However, the native desktop apps are just better.
It's hard to make a direct comparison with Google's web-app-only strategy since the Workspace apps are toys in comparison, more akin to Apple's iWork suite.
I haven't used Sheets as extensively as I've used Excel, and once upon a time I was a real Excel machine who knew all the alt menu navigation by heart (great precursor training for vim) but I have slowly become a Sheets convert.
Being able to write appscript between all the Workplace products was pretty painless.
I haven't tried to push Sheets to do million row fat sheets for crunching but wouldn't be surprised if it does ok
I am using Excel on windows again lately and it is reasonably smooth but boy do I miss Drive + Sheets + collaboration for a 2023 remote workflow
I can totally see that, and Sheets seems like the most capable app in the suite. And although I found myself frusted by Docs and Slides limitations, I know that they're perfectly fine for lots of (maybe most?) use cases.
> Web tools are always going to be weak vs. locally executing tools. I've never seen one that I prefer to a native equivalent.
Sure, that's a fact which I don't dispute, but that doesn't mean that writing a word document in your browser should be such a bad experience that you really just want to use the web version for viewing documents, which is the absurd thing to which I responded. See, what you say is true, but that doesn't necessarily negate my point if you can agree?
Word is not Photoshop, I expect the web version to be powerful enough to get serious writing done via it.
I don't. I expect MSFT to make a hash of it, and to do so in an environment (a browser) that I've never found equal to the task of "getting out of the way and letting me write."
