Google Sheets vs. Microsoft Office 2016 (discontinued)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Google Sheets
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Google Sheets is the spreadsheet app available on Google Workspace, or standalone, with a free plan for personal use and accessible via mobile apps for iOS and Android.N/A
Microsoft Office 2016 (discontinued)
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft Office 2016 is the familiar suite of Office products including applications such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for use on a single PC or Mac. The 2016 is no longer available for sale from Microsoft, and support is at an end since 2020.N/A
Pricing
Google SheetsMicrosoft Office 2016 (discontinued)
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Google SheetsMicrosoft Office 2016 (discontinued)
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Google SheetsMicrosoft Office 2016 (discontinued)
Considered Both Products
Google Sheets
Chose Google Sheets
My organization uses Google Sheets instead of Microsoft Excel because we are a Google shop. Sheets permissions are especially easy via existing Google Workspace groups. We're a very collaborative company that values easy browser-based simultaneous document editing and …
Chose Google Sheets
On Microsoft, we can't edit the documents at the same time with our friends and co-workers, we need to save everything on the computer memory. I find Google Sheets to be a lot superior, by allowing us to save everything up in the cloud, to read, share and edit whatever document …
Microsoft Office 2016 (discontinued)

No answer on this topic

Best Alternatives
Google SheetsMicrosoft Office 2016 (discontinued)
Small Businesses
Stackby
Stackby
Score 8.8 out of 10
Zoho WorkDrive
Zoho WorkDrive
Score 9.3 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Excel
Score 9.0 out of 10
Google Workspace
Google Workspace
Score 9.1 out of 10
Enterprises
Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Excel
Score 9.0 out of 10
Microsoft 365 Business Premium
Microsoft 365 Business Premium
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Google SheetsMicrosoft Office 2016 (discontinued)
Likelihood to Recommend
9.1
(93 ratings)
7.5
(64 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(3 ratings)
5.0
(3 ratings)
Usability
8.7
(55 ratings)
7.0
(3 ratings)
Availability
9.5
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.5
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.0
(1 ratings)
8.0
(45 ratings)
Configurability
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.7
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Google SheetsMicrosoft Office 2016 (discontinued)
Likelihood to Recommend
Google
Google Sheets is well suited in two main areas: is free to use and you don't need to buy a license to use it, comparing to the most direct competitors ; collaboration is in my opinion the best advantage, with multiple people working together and seeing others working in real time. It's less appropriate in low connectivity environments (offline capabilities)
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Discontinued Products
I'd recommend [Microsoft] Office2016 for any business that has more than a couple of users, as the software is very scalable from just a small business to a large enterprise corporation. I don't know of any case where it might not be appropriate, as even home users and students use the software suite as well.
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Pros
Google
  • Collaborative planning : In the initial phase of project, Team leads and architects create a permission matrix along with the naming convention simultaneously, seeing who is editing / adding the details in real-time.
  • Cost tracking : We use this tool to track cloud resource usage monthly costs, so that we can analyse it and send out comms for high cost based resources. By storing cost data here, it's easy for use to store data of last couple of years.
  • Flexible documentation : For change logging of different scenarios we would need different / ad-hoc columns to be added on the fly, which makes using this tool much simpler then reputed third party tools.
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Discontinued Products
  • Data manipulation. Excel takes the raw data we receive and allows us to digest it in ways that are useful to our business processes.
  • Communication. Outlook serves as our primary means of communication and setting up appointments.
  • Documentation. Word is the default standard when it comes to using a word processor and we are no different in this regard. Nearly every user has to use the application on a regular basis in order to accomplish their work.
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Cons
Google
  • Ease of use - I collaborate with a lot of folks on these and a lot of them have trouble using it.
  • Would love more live features; for example, being able to have cells react to other inputs (checkboxes, etc) with reactive formatting
  • More cross-usability with other Google products; it's hard to think of drawbacks honestly, this is a pretty seamless software.
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Discontinued Products
  • Office 2016 professional edition can be priced for a single user license, it would be nice to see a drop in the pricing.
  • Office 2016 home edition is a better price but does not include outlook 2016, so it is not a good fit for the workplace environments.
  • Office 2016 can run slowly on older systems, so you need to make sure you have a machine that is 4 years old or less for it to run smoothly.
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Likelihood to Renew
Google
I am not involved in the purchase/selection process, but my organization is a Google shop, and Sheets meets most of our spreadsheet needs and works seamlessly with our other tools. I don't anticipate our switching anytime soon.
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Discontinued Products
We believe that office 2016 offers the best value when it comes to features included out of the box. The software is used in its entirety by our organization and is easily supported by our staff of IT technicians. Users find this software to be easy to learn and easy to use with minimal learning curve.
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Usability
Google
It can easily handle most uses and functions. It is only for very large datasets or advanced analysis that it either lacks the proper functions or performance begins to slow. Most employees who continue to use competitors' products do so out of preference, familiarity with the user interface, or other surface-level reasons.
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Discontinued Products
It's fairly easy to use, but the automatic formatting or capturing of formatting when pasting is wonky - especially when there are outlines or other bullets/numbered lists. Fixing and sizing up tables can be annoying, and there are sometimes formatting issues that we just absolutely cannot fix for some reason
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Reliability and Availability
Google
Like most Google products, Google Sheets rarely has outages or slowness, and when it does, connection is always momentarily restored. I can't recall a time when I've been unable to access Google Sheets but able to access other sites just fine. That said, errors aren't uncommon when handling large data volume. You know what they say about using spreadsheets as databases, but sometimes it's just the most convenient option, especially for smaller or one-off projects, and not being able to store large amounts of data hampers our ability to move quickly with scrappy prototypes or full solutions. It would be great if we could better integrate our data manipulation (Apps Script) with big data in the sheet.
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Discontinued Products
No answers on this topic
Performance
Google
Again, Google Sheets is no exception to Google's general high speed and reliability, but load times can be slow for larger amounts of data. I've used Sheets with Zapier and have used the Python API, and speed has never been an issue.
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Discontinued Products
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Google
I have never contacted Google Sheets support, but Google Sheets makes it very easy to report an issue or suggest a feature from Sheets itself (Help > Help Sheets improve), and I've had mostly good experiences with support for other Google products.
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Discontinued Products
I am an MS feedback hub participant and they certainly don't pay enough attention to several bugs several people raise it in the portal. For the enterprise, it seems to me based on my prior experience that yes, they have a dedicated team to support operations. For mid to small companies or single users, it has been a struggle. So, you are pretty much with MS Blogs and others.
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Alternatives Considered
Google
I have found that I can do almost everything I could have done in Microsoft Excel faster and easier in Google Sheets. We recommend Google Sheets in 99.9% of our use cases and feel it meets the needs of our workers very well. I am sure there are other spreadsheet creation programs out there, but because we are already in the Google environment, adopting Google Sheets in very easy.
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Discontinued Products
We use Microsoft Office 2016 because at the time it was the best tool for us, but now with full attention to cloud products, we may be thinking of migrating our solution to a cloud service.
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Google
I'm not involved with the purchase, but I assume everything goes smoothly and that the pricing structure is predictable and reasonable. We do not get surprise fees.
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Discontinued Products
No answers on this topic
Scalability
Google
Google Sheets works very well with multiple users. It's convenient to see in real-time who is collaborating in a sheet, down to the specific cell that they're viewing/editing. Linking Sheets across departments is convenient with the IMPORTRANGE function.
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Discontinued Products
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Google
  • Don't need to pay for windows 365 license as it is free
  • Has a positive impact since I am not cursing excel for annoying problems(I don't want the new Pivot table format, I want to use Classic and I don't want to expand/collapse arrows. "x$#%")
  • [Haven't] looked at return on investment on work, but has "simplified" for basic and medium spreadsheets.
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Discontinued Products
  • Microsoft Office 2016 saves me a lot of time daily. I have functions and macros set up that calculate and show me a lot of things just from a couple of my inputs. This would take full days sometimes if not for that.
  • Apart from time, it saves me money, I manage data in Excel, I don't have to buy software specifically for that.
  • Sooner or later my company will have to switch to new edition, which will hurt revenues because of a subscription model.
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ScreenShots