Copy a few cells from a Google sheet and paste it in an email, then do the same with Excel. Collaborate on building out a document from scratch with 10 people in Google sheets vs Excel.
Excel is a monster, and much more powerful than Google sheets in many ways, but in my experience, Google docs apps are a little better for collaboration, and they integrate a little tighter with each other.
Google docs is their document editor. Sheets is a part of GSuite.
I've also never had trouble pasting a spreedsheet selection into a word document. Email is a nightmare in general though.
I'm not sold on collaboration personally. I've had to do it a bunch since the pandemic began and I've found it to be an anti pattern. One of the big inconsistencies is that cells in sheets don't update while being edited while collaborating, which is not great if you have a spreadsheet heavy workflow. Docs is impossible to replace that though, because it's auto formatting is draconian and always seems to reset its preferences. When editing docs we spend more time formatting them then creating the content.
> I'm not sold on collaboration personally. I've had to do it a bunch since the pandemic began and I've found it to be an anti pattern.
How much of this is really related to technology? I do a lot of writing in both Word and Google Docs and see different sets of problems for both products. Having a group of people jump into either and expecting a good product (and experience getting there) is unrealistic.
With the pandemic, I think people have been trying lots of things without understanding what will be most effective. At least early on, there was a feeling that people had to be seen to be productive. It's nothing like real remote work.
For important docs, I still come back to having individuals write their content and only then does one person attempt to assemble it. The individuals often need their own independent reviews and consultation anyway before they have a decent draft. In some ways it improves visibility and helps with keeping folks on schedule too.
Google sheets is the specific example that I hate. In my experience, it's often laggy and clunky. You can't even scroll smoothly: the window MUST snap to row/column lines. When I realized that google sheets has such a laughable shortcoming, I knew I needed to get out of google office eventually.
i think copying some cells from excel into outlook, which i guess is the comparable transaction, works pretty well - what doesn't work for you? Maybe I am just missing out on some amazing functionality by not using google docs.
Personally, I like it better sometimes for having less features. MS Word has such a massive number of formatting features that interact in complex ways that there's plenty of ways for your document to end up formatted in a weird way and to be very difficult to figure out exactly where the switch is to make it not do something. I think one time I had a document where the entire doc was highlighted in yellow, and it took me over an hour of fiddling with various formatting boxes to figure out how to turn it off. Any word processor that doesn't have the capability to do that has some appeal to me.
I haven't seen a word processing document in a professional setting for many years now (didn't realize it until just now). Who uses a word processor these days? Writers certainly don't use that garbage.
I use text editors so I can think about the content and if it is going to get prettied up with fonts it goes into a target system that supports markdown (confluence, git, email, etc..). If you are flummoxing around in a word processor or sending around formatted docs that aren't PDF I fully expect people to be looking at you sideways.
I hate to inform you that, yes, writers do indeed use “that garbage”. I’m married to an author who regularly uses Scrivener to write. But anytime she has to send anything to anyone she has to convert to a Word document and send that out. Everyone uses Word that she interacts with. (Though author friends of hers might also use Scrivener for their writing)
Writers who understand git, let alone Markdown, are going to be extremely rare. You’re in a bubble if you haven’t encountered how dependent the writing field is on Word documents.
Unfortunately I do agree with this. I think a lot of tech isn't a matter of "what's the best?" but instead "what's the least bad?". I don't think Office is perfect but I think it's a lot less bad than google. I don't think MacOS is great but it's a lot better than windows for certain things, and vice versa. IMO unless software puts the user first in allowing customization and control, the best we can ever get is good instead of great.
