Excel vs Google Sheets — it's the spreadsheet debate that never quite ends. We use both daily in our work with clients. Here's an honest breakdown of when each tool wins, when they overlap, and how to decide which one fits your business.
Let's address the elephant in the room first: for most business tasks, both tools are good enough. The differences are at the edges — and those edges matter when you're committing your whole team to one platform. Let's get into specifics.
Quick Verdict (For Those in a Hurry)
If you need a one-line answer:
- Use Google Sheets if collaboration, sharing, and cloud-first work is your priority
- Use Excel if you need raw power, advanced analytics, or work with large datasets
- Use both if your business actually has different needs in different teams — which is more common than people admit
If you want the reasoning behind those calls, keep reading.
Where Excel Still Wins
1. Performance with large datasets
Excel can handle spreadsheets with hundreds of thousands of rows without slowing down. Google Sheets has a hard limit of 10 million cells per file, but performance starts degrading well before that — usually around 50,000 rows with complex formulas. If you're working with significant data volumes, Excel is the more reliable choice.
2. Advanced functions and analytical depth
Excel has more sophisticated functions, particularly for financial modeling, statistical analysis, and complex array operations. Functions like XLOOKUP, the new dynamic array functions, and Power Query are mature in Excel and either limited or missing in Sheets. If you build financial models, Excel is still the industry standard.
3. VBA and macro automation
Excel's VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) is a mature, powerful automation language. Google Sheets' equivalent — Apps Script — is good but works differently and has its own quirks. For repeatable, complex automation in spreadsheets, VBA is more capable and has decades of community support online.
4. Charting and visualizations
Excel's charting engine is more flexible. You have more chart types, more customization options, and finer control over visual details. For polished reports and presentations, Excel still produces better-looking output with less effort.
5. Offline access
Excel works without internet by default. Google Sheets offline mode exists but it's clunky and unreliable for serious work.
Where Google Sheets Wins
1. Real-time collaboration
This is the killer feature. Multiple people editing the same sheet simultaneously, seeing each other's cursors, commenting on cells, tagging colleagues — it works, and it works well. Excel's online collaboration has improved, but it's still not as smooth as Google's. If your team collaborates on spreadsheets daily, Sheets often saves hours of "wait, who has the latest version?"
2. Sharing and access control
Sharing a Google Sheet is trivial — paste a link, choose permissions, done. No version-control nightmares, no email attachments with file names like "Budget_v3_FINAL_REAL_final.xlsx". For internal documents that need broad access, Sheets dramatically reduces friction.
3. Integration with web data
Functions like IMPORTRANGE, IMPORTHTML, IMPORTXML, and GOOGLEFINANCE let you pull live data from other sheets, websites, or stock markets directly into a cell. Excel can do similar things with Power Query, but Sheets' functions are more accessible and friendly for non-technical users.
4. No software installation
Anyone with a Google account and a browser can use Sheets. No license to manage, no software to install, no IT involvement. This matters a lot for distributed teams, freelancers, and businesses without dedicated IT support.
5. Apps Script for web-connected automation
Apps Script can do things VBA can't easily do — send emails based on sheet content, post to Slack, pull data from APIs, trigger on schedules. For automating workflows that connect spreadsheets to other web services, Apps Script is more natural than VBA.
Cost Comparison
Pricing changes regularly, but the rough picture for SMEs:
- Excel requires a Microsoft 365 subscription (around $6–12 per user/month for business plans). One-time purchases of standalone Office exist but are pricey and don't get updates
- Google Sheets is free for personal Gmail accounts. Google Workspace (business email + Sheets + Drive + Meet) starts around $6 per user/month
For most SMEs, total cost is comparable. The decision should rest on functionality and workflow, not price.
What about Microsoft 365 Web?
Excel's web version is free with any Microsoft account. It's less powerful than desktop Excel but improving fast, and it offers Google Sheets-style collaboration. For occasional spreadsheet work, it's a credible free option.
How to Decide for Your Business
Ask yourself these questions, in this order:
1. Does your team collaborate live on spreadsheets?
If yes, lean toward Google Sheets. The collaboration experience alone often justifies the choice.
2. Do you work with datasets over 50,000 rows?
If yes, lean toward Excel. You'll hit performance walls in Sheets.
3. Do you build financial models, do statistical work, or use VBA macros?
If yes, Excel is the better tool. Apps Script can do a lot, but VBA and Excel's deeper analytics suite remain more capable.
4. Does your team work remotely, on different devices, or across different operating systems?
If yes, Google Sheets is more forgiving. Excel works across platforms but Sheets just sidesteps the issue entirely.
5. Do you already pay for Google Workspace or Microsoft 365?
If yes, just use the spreadsheet that comes with it. The marginal benefit of switching rarely justifies the friction.
The Pragmatic Answer: Use Both
In our work, we use both — and so do many of our clients. The pattern that works well:
- Google Sheets for anything collaborative, shared with clients or external parties, or that needs to be accessed from multiple devices
- Excel for financial models, complex analytics, datasets with serious data volume, and final-output reports that need polished formatting
You can export from one to the other when needed. The formats aren't 100% compatible (formulas, charts, and macros sometimes break in translation), but for most data the round trip works fine.
Need Help With Either?
VeridaTech builds dashboards, automation, and financial spreadsheets in both Excel and Google Sheets. We work in whichever tool fits your team — and we can help you move from one to the other if you decide to switch.
See our Excel & Spreadsheets services, or get in touch to discuss a specific project. If you're building dashboards specifically, check out our piece on the 5 KPIs every small business should track.
