Was certainly the case in the early years of Google Sheets. For me, the gap is entirely closed. I'm willing to believe that Excel still has the better platform for extreme power users but I've done some pretty slick stuff with Google Sheets and that was four or five years ago. It must be even better today (though I'm not currenlty doing much with spreadsheets).

Has google sheets filled out the lambda helper functions yet? If so that could narrow the gap.

Passing around vba based xlsm is really awful, so if google sheets has lambdas they can probably get a lead with google sheets queey language over filter.

Groupby and pivotby are the new excel alternative, but if they filled out lambdas, then does that keave VBA and power query as the only reasons for Excel?

Not sure what lambda helpers are. But you can write Google AppScript which is just JS and do some pretty cool stuff, including define custom functions and fully integrate with Google APIs. I've used to to send emails, or create calendar events for example.

Byrow, bycol, map, reduce, scan, makearray, and most recently groupby and pivotby.

Basically functions that take a lambda argument and apply it over some range.

I agree with it, but it's a wild world we live in when the best spreadsheet has default behaviors which will fuck your data pasted into it when you're not paying attention.

Yeah, its also awesome when you open a CSV with long numbers like tracking numbers or IMEIs and they get converted to scientific notation and lose "precision" when saved in Excel format...

Exactly what I'm talking about. I'm sure there's other gremlins in there, but this one bites me the most often, and the hardest.

The one failure mode is so fucking insidious where it zeros out your last 2 digits, but otherwise it looks like it pasted OK!