Google Sheets

I love how simple to use Google Sheets is, that it is all online (but also with the ability to use it offline too - giving you the best of both worlds). If you have used Excel, then there is no learning curve, and Google Sheets is totally free. The collaboration is excellent, allowing you to work with clients in real-time while both updating the same document.

Google Sheets is very similar to Excel, and has about 95% of the same functionality. However, from time to time there is an advanced feature that I previously used from Excel that has no equivalent in Google Sheets. This is only for more advanced use cases, and on a day to day basis, it covers 99% of what I need to do.

Google Sheets is a lifesaver for several of my classes. I am able to track data in an organized and efficient manner. The formulas are so easy to incorporate to track various things.

One of the main drawbacks for Google Sheets is combining cells such as first & last names without deleting the information in the rest of the cells. There was an add on that would do this, but it needs to be incorporated as a default option.

I like that Google Sheets are accessible online and changes are live, so it's easy to collab with teammates. It's also really easy to comments and tag and assign it to other people to track edits, notes, etc.

There are a few features which I find easier to use in Microsoft Excel, so there's just a slight learning curve with Google Sheets.

The basic features of Google Sheets are very easy to use, especially if like me, you spent the first 30 years of your life on Microsoft products. Google didn't reinvent the wheel and most of the functions used in Google have identical syntax to Excel, so you won't spend time re-learning how to sum your rows or columns. If you don't need to do anything overly complex in a spreadsheet, Sheets is an absolutely acceptable alternative to its competitor

While the basic features are simple and easier. Some of the "intermediate" features require a bit of research. For example, basic conditional formatting is fairly straight forward—however, if you want to do even a little bit beyond basic, for example, look for duplicates (which is very straightforward in Excel), you need to apply custom functions within conditional formatting rules. And if you're not relatively informed or willing to sit through a YouTube tutorial, it's not going to be super clear what the correct answer is. Also, Google's customer service doesn't usually supply any help here; I've seen numerous threads between customers and Google where customers ask how to do very common tasks or ask about common features and the reply is a resounding "We don't do that.". I'm in a privileged position because I work at a company that actually teaches people how to use Google Sheets, so I have a free resource to teach myself tricks if necessary, but despite this, the syntax for "complicated" tasks is easy to forget and I do often find myself looking up the same things over and over again.