I have been in a few discussions recently about the worthiness of Microsoft Excel, Google Spreadsheets, and OpenOffice Spreadsheet.
My claim is that none of them have features that I need that none of the others have.
I keep jumping into the conversation at the point where people start championing the massive feature set of Microsoft Excel. I ask them what features Excel has that none of the others bring to the table. Instead of getting answers, the conversation switches to needing to use Excel because the office they work in demands it.
But I still haven’t heard which features these people need out of Excel.
For me, I can use all three of them. There is nothing that I do that isn’t a feature in all three of them. I prefer OpenOffice for anything that I plan on keeping since I spend about equal amount of time on Linux and Windows. I like using Google Spreadsheet for quick throw away things.
So, let’s work on the basis that work/family/Dell will let you use whichever one you want as long as the features are there. Which ones would that mean you can use?
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2 comments ↓
I’m mostly with you on this, with some caveats. I’m a pretty good Visual Basic programmer, so if you want to do some custom “macro” programming, Office has VBA built right in. That is for work.
At home, the Open Office or Google stuff is fine and is in fact what I use.
I have always had issues with using the VBA for those macros. It just seems like a bad way to get locked into a piece of software. I’m not sure what a better option is, but I still never have liked it.
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