I’ve used it for a number of larger operating and valuation models over the past years and am very impressed with the performance. One of the misconceptions my colleagues and I had was the notion that Sheets is fine for small calculations-more or less like an advanced calculator-but not useful for larger models or datasets. There are levels of access rights, which ensures that security and posterity is kept in check by granting appropriate people the right level of access. Not everyone needs to be able to edit a spreadsheet. There is also room for different types of participants. The multiple cursors in different colors, moving across the screen at the same time to build a model, is almost like a time-lapse video of a painting. The productivity of two or three people who are all highly skilled with Google Sheets quickly building out a financial or operating model together in real time is really a sight compared to the old way of working. With asynchronous editing, you can use the comment feature to alert people and assign them tasks that they can then can mark as completed.Įditing a spreadsheet live with other colleagues is a powerful way of working. There are several different modes of collaborating, ranging from the asynchronous where you work independently and mostly at different times, in the same file, to real-time simultaneous collaborative editing. The “old style” of working would be using a master file that someone has to “own,” which is then (in the best case) kept on a shared network folder, or painstakingly emailed around. The most immediate benefit from using Sheets is in the ability to collaborate in completely new ways. The other is that Excel is not a standalone tool: There is an ecosystem of plugins out there, many of which are not (yet) available for Google Sheets, meaning that you, in some cases, may end up juggling both applications. There are really only two that stand out: One is that many of the benefits depend on collaboration with others, and here you will find that the uneven uptake in the organization will place limits on how fast you can take some of the features into use. In addition to listing the advantages, I will also touch on some of the negative aspects I have experienced in this shift.
I have worked with many people who, even though they may have switched to Google Sheets, still use it in the old offline Excel mold, meaning that they lose out on a number of productivity-enhancing features. In my experience, there are many finance and business professionals out there who are still working with Excel spreadsheets in the same way that many of us learned over 10 years ago in the pre-cloud era.
Instead, I will focus on Google Sheets’ advantages and the new ways of working that the emergence of online productivity tools have enabled. I won’t, however, be giving a feature comparison between Google Sheets and Excel their features change so quickly that such analysis would become redundant within weeks. In a later article, I will go deeper into Google Apps Script and demonstrate a tutorial for getting started.
Toward the end, I will also provide an introduction to Google Apps Script, a powerful tool for automating workflows and extending Google Sheets’ functionality. In this article, I will share some of the most useful Google Sheets features that I learned early on, which dramatically improved my productivity. Consequently, since then I’ve been using Sheets (spreadsheets) and Slides (presentations) products almost daily, learning their functionality and experiencing new ways of working. A couple of years ago, the company I work for took the significant step of moving all of its 11,000 employees over to Google’s G Suite.