Because it was launched in 1985, Microsoft’s Excel has grow to be the go-to spreadsheet program amongst monetary professionals—and, definitely, it stays a strong device. There are loads of causes why it’s retained its recognition for many years. However the rise in cloud computing, particularly for the reason that starting of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the exponential development of the quantity of knowledge companies gather have modified the way in which we work, presumably ceaselessly.
At the moment’s collaborative, cloud-based enterprise surroundings is the place some great benefits of Google Sheets actually stand out. Nonetheless, there are lots of finance and enterprise professionals who’re nonetheless working with Excel spreadsheets in the identical approach that many people discovered within the precloud period, even those that have switched to Microsoft’s cloud-based Microsoft 365.
In 2016, the commercial equipment manufacturing firm the place I oversee monetary information analytics took the numerous step of transferring all of its 11,000 staff to Google’s G Suite, now Google Workspace—becoming a member of the rising variety of corporations making the swap from Excel. Consequently, I’ve been utilizing Google Sheets virtually every day since then, changing into a self-taught skilled in its performance and progressive methods of working. I’ve used Google Sheets to construct discounted cash-flow fashions for big acquisitions, to handle advanced integration initiatives, for monetary planning and evaluation, and, fairly often, as a alternative for a whiteboard after I wish to sketch one thing in a web based assembly.
On this article, I share among the benefits of Google Sheets, highlighting the options which have dramatically improved my productiveness. I additionally present an introduction to Google Apps Script, a strong device for automating workflows and lengthening Google Sheets’ performance.
I don’t, nevertheless, present a head-to-head function matchup of Excel versus Google Sheets; functionalities change so rapidly that such an evaluation would grow to be out of date inside weeks. As an alternative, I deal with Google Sheets’ benefits and the brand new methods of working that the emergence of on-line productiveness instruments have enabled. I additionally contact on among the unfavourable facets of creating the shift from Microsoft.
The Benefits of Google Sheets
The primary benefits Google Sheets has over Excel are seamless collaborative performance, the power to deal with extraordinarily giant initiatives and information units by means of its integration with BigQuery, and the automation alternatives obtainable by means of Google Apps Script. Whereas Excel and others additionally supply these capabilities, Google has made them so intuitive and end-user-friendly that even probably the most change-averse finance professionals can rapidly stand up to hurry and begin seeing tangible advantages.
Straightforward Collaboration
Probably the most instant benefit of utilizing Sheets is the potential to collaborate seamlessly. Within the outdated type of working, you’d use a grasp file that somebody needed to “personal,” which was (in a finest case state of affairs) saved in a shared community folder or painstakingly emailed backwards and forwards amongst customers.
In distinction, Sheets incorporates a number of modes of collaborating, starting from the asynchronous—when collaborators work independently and principally at totally different instances, in the identical file—to real-time simultaneous collaborative enhancing. With asynchronous enhancing, you should use the remark function to alert folks to questions or considerations and assign them duties that they’ll mark full after they end them.
Good chips put fast data on the person’s fingertips with out their having to click on out of the doc. For instance, folks chips determine the individual answerable for particular duties and supply a hyperlink to their contact data, whereas file and calendar occasion chips put context and extra supplies at hand. Mixed with the timeline view function, which allows customers to visualize time-associated information, sensible chips make Sheets a wonderful hub not just for monetary evaluation but additionally as a hub for actions and knowledge, together with all facets of initiatives.
Enhancing a spreadsheet dwell with different colleagues is a strong approach of working. The productiveness of two or three people who find themselves all extremely expert with Google Sheets rapidly constructing out a monetary or working mannequin collectively in actual time is a outstanding sight in comparison with the outdated approach of working. The a number of cursors in numerous colours, transferring throughout the display screen on the identical time to construct a mannequin, look virtually like a time-lapse video of a portray being created.
There’s additionally room for several types of contributors. Not everybody wants to have the ability to edit a spreadsheet, for instance. View- and comment-only choices preserve safety and information integrity whereas granting visibility to those that want it.
Constructed-in Model Management
For those who’ve ever had the painful expertise of a spreadsheet crash past restoration that leads to hours of misplaced work, you might need developed the behavior of saving information ceaselessly. That is high quality—if cumbersome—for one individual working alone, however when a number of variations of a file start to flow into amongst colleagues and somebody forgets to replace the file identify, chaos can ensue.
Google Workspace makes it potential to have only one file all through the lifetime of the challenge, due to its built-in model monitoring. Accessible by means of “See model historical past” within the menu, this function means that you can see all edits made to a doc by means of a useful timeline. It additionally contains the identify of the one who made every change. Each alteration is saved and you may “rewind” to any earlier level within the file’s life, again to when it was first created. Not solely that, however for any particular person cell, you may choose “Present edit historical past” and click on again by means of every edit to see who modified it, when, and to which worth.
This function is accessible to each Google Workspace person. Microsoft customers will want both SharePoint or OneDrive to entry model historical past for Excel.
Working at Scale
One of many misconceptions my colleagues and I had once we adopted Sheets was that it could be high quality for small calculations—kind of like a sophisticated calculator—however not helpful for bigger fashions or information units. However because it seems, Google Sheets is simply as highly effective as a desktop utility. As I reveal beneath, Google Sheets can capably deal with giant monetary fashions, and it could actually connect with Google BigQuery to investigate big information units.
For instance, if you’re engaged on an M&A challenge, one of many many paperwork you’re more likely to want is a monetary mannequin to gather all of the related historic monetary information and varied forward-looking situations based mostly on drivers. For those who typically work on M&A, then you probably have a tendency to begin from a template that incorporates every little thing you want, similar to standardized monetary statements, valuation calculations, and so on. The present doc then grows over the course of the challenge to include monetary and tax due diligence changes into the historic financials, utilizing business/market due diligence to help the varied situations for monetary projections.
Over the course of a number of months, the file can develop to dozens of tabs with a posh internet of hyperlinks between them. Sheets not solely handles the massive quantity of interconnected information effectively however, due to its model historical past function, you’ll by no means once more yell “Who modified the low cost fee?!” when your valuation mannequin output is unexpectedly off.
Analyzing Very Giant Knowledge Units
As I discussed, Google Sheets connects to Google BigQuery, Google Cloud’s information warehouse and analytics engine, which lets you analyze big information units immediately in Sheets. BigQuery can home your whole group’s information and make it obtainable for analytics use, whether or not for evaluation by area consultants similar to finance professionals or for superior machine studying use circumstances led by a knowledge science crew.
To reveal the facility of this course of, I as soon as used the next instance in a Sheets coaching session at work:
- From inside Sheets, I related to one of many public information units in BigQuery: Chicago taxi journeys. On the time, this contained 195 million rows of knowledge.
- Then I created a pivot desk from the complete information, with the time of day and day of week on the 2 axes, and the variety of journeys as values.
- Lastly, I utilized conditional formatting, similar to utilizing purple to characterize peak hours, to make the patterns stand out extra clearly.
All the course of took lower than two minutes.
Except you’re within the taxi enterprise, this explicit information evaluation is maybe not very helpful, nevertheless it exhibits how rapidly you may analyze giant information units utilizing the mix of BigQuery and Sheets to successfully acquire and talk insights.
To supply one other instance of Sheets pivot desk utilization, a finance skilled may want to tug information from totally different techniques into one evaluation—maybe one consolidation system holds higher-level information that must be reconciled in opposition to a number of detailed information sources. If your organization makes the info obtainable by means of BigQuery, you may, with only a few clicks, hyperlink every information supply into one spreadsheet and put the related views subsequent to one another. You’ll be able to then rapidly carry out typical spreadsheet calculations proper subsequent to—and utilizing information from—your BigQuery-powered pivot tables or extracts.
It’s also possible to create charts and formulation utilizing information from BigQuery information units. In case you have your whole monetary information in BigQuery, you may develop analyses and stories in a short time.
Connecting to Exterior Knowledge Sources
With the ability to pull information right into a spreadsheet as a way to work with it’s a elementary want for monetary professionals. Google Sheets affords a lot of built-in formulation that do that, such because the Googlefinance components, which helps you to pull information immediately from Google Finance. Though not similar to an expert service similar to Bloomberg, it’s nonetheless a wonderful device for acquiring public inventory and foreign money data, like these closing bell costs for Alphabet inventory in January 2018:
There are additionally different, extra basic methods to get information from the net. The performance to extract an HTML desk or checklist immediately from an internet site can, for instance, be helpful with monetary, market, or different publicly obtainable data that you just wish to retrieve and work with.
Connecting to the Whole Google Workspace
Google Apps Script is a strong device that opens virtually limitless prospects not solely to increase and automate workflows in Sheets, but additionally to attach it with different components of Google Workspace. This automation device seamlessly connects Sheets, Drive, and BigQuery operations into one workflow. I’ve quite a few examples at work the place we’ve used Apps Script to create a lot of copies of a template reporting spreadsheet, mechanically downloaded totally different monetary data from BigQuery into every of them, after which shared every model with totally different folks. This ensured that varied groups may see solely their very own delicate information, like prices.
Does Google Sheets Have Any Disadvantages?
I’ve been evangelizing Google Sheets. Nonetheless, not everyone seems to be offered on its advantages but. And I believe that’s due to certainly one of Sheets’ drawbacks: A lot of its advantages rely on collaboration with others, and also you’ll discover that uneven adoption in your group will place limits on how briskly you may take full benefit of among the options.
Additionally, Google Sheets, like all software program, can have its small annoyances, similar to a keyboard shortcut or two that aren’t what you’d count on or a function that’s lacking or doesn’t behave the way in which you need. In lots of circumstances, although, these annoyances are primarily an issue for customers nonetheless habituated to Excel quite than a purposeful weak point of Google Sheets.
One other downside is that Excel’s success depends on its ecosystem of plugins, lots of which aren’t (but) obtainable for Google Sheets. Which means when you can’t replicate what you want with Google Apps Script, utilizing Sheets means chances are you’ll must toggle between each purposes.
Enhanced Collaboration Wins Out
Spreadsheets are some of the vital instruments, if not the most vital device, for a lot of finance and enterprise professionals. They’re our canvases, our notepads, and our devices. Over the course of our careers, we spend 1000’s of hours utilizing them. We’d like our experiences with them to be nice and environment friendly.
I’ve seen big productiveness advantages from the collaboration options and different improvements that include utilizing web-based productiveness purposes like Google Sheets as in comparison with their conventional desktop counterparts. Cloud-based Microsoft 365 has grow to be extra sturdy lately, however its collaborative performance nonetheless has not fully caught up to in the present day’s calls for.
There are additionally immense productivity-enhancing advantages from studying to make use of these instruments past the elementary degree, as I hope I’ve demonstrated. With tendencies similar to elevated distant collaboration and the necessity to analyze ever-larger information units persevering with, discovering the functionalities that give you the results you want is essential, and the enterprise case for evaluating Google Sheets retains getting stronger.
This text has not too long ago undergone a complete replace to include the most recent and most correct data. Feedback beneath could predate these modifications.
