Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet application available as part of Microsoft 365 (Office 365), or standalone, in cloud-based and on-premise editions.
$6.99
per month
Smartsheet
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Smartsheet is an online project management and collaboration tool. It includes automated alerts, instantaneous updating and sharing across team members, resource management, nested tasks organized in a hierarchy, a Gantt chart view, exportable and automated reports, and integration with email.
Excel will always be selected because it's part of the Office Suite. We started to use Smartsheet, but the onboarding and training process took too long when compounded with licensing setup & costs. Apple Numbers works well, but without the maturity of Excel. Since Apple …
Excel has a greater capability of making the sheet look like anything I want. The aspect missing is the ability to report similar text statistics across multiple sheets with ease. I prefer Excel when tracking data.
While other products have been useful for being easily sharable or free, Microsoft Excel handles more data with easier to use functions, pivot tables, graphing, and formulas than all that I have used. Google Sheets is a close second but has not been able to handle the large …
Microsoft Excel users have appreciated its flexibility for a variety of applications. As highlighted by reviewers, Excel has been widely used for data analysis, budgeting, creating charts, project management, among other tasks in both professional and academic settings. Users have found its functionalities, such as formulas, pivot tables, and macros, to be very powerful for dealing with large data sets and complex computations.
On the other hand, customers have cited Smartsheet as an ideal tool for project management, team collaboration and work tracking. According to user reviews, Smartsheet has been extensively used for scheduling, planning, tracking project timelines, resource allocation and more. It has been noted by users for its real-time collaboration, workflow automation, and integrations with other tools, which have especially benefited teams working remotely.
In comparison, Excel and Smartsheet serve somewhat similar use cases, but with different focuses. One striking difference from user feedback is the collaborative nature of Smartsheet, which seems to be more suited for real-time teamwork as compared to Excel. Yet, Excel’s powerful capabilities for handling large data sets and complex calculations have been brought to light, making it more suitable for in-depth data analysis tasks. Thus, user preference seems to heavily depend upon the specific needs and use-cases.
Features
Microsoft Excel
Smartsheet
Project Management
Comparison of Project Management features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft Excel
-
Ratings
Smartsheet
8.9
126 Ratings
16% above category average
Task Management
00 Ratings
9.8123 Ratings
Resource Management
00 Ratings
9.5105 Ratings
Gantt Charts
00 Ratings
9.3106 Ratings
Scheduling
00 Ratings
9.8108 Ratings
Workflow Automation
00 Ratings
9.197 Ratings
Team Collaboration
00 Ratings
9.8119 Ratings
Support for Agile Methodology
00 Ratings
8.279 Ratings
Support for Waterfall Methodology
00 Ratings
8.977 Ratings
Document Management
00 Ratings
7.898 Ratings
Email integration
00 Ratings
9.697 Ratings
Mobile Access
00 Ratings
6.793 Ratings
Timesheet Tracking
00 Ratings
9.660 Ratings
Change request and Case Management
00 Ratings
7.466 Ratings
Budget and Expense Management
00 Ratings
9.272 Ratings
Professional Services Automation
Comparison of Professional Services Automation features of Product A and Product B
I don't really know another program as powerful as Excel. I've used Google Doc programs but do not feel they come close. So far, anytime I've needed a table of some sort for data, whether it's budget oriented or information off a survey, the best system has been Excel. We do web audits on occasion and we create an Excel worksheet featuring every URL of the pages we're auditing, notes, data about the content, information about files attached to the page and other information to help us determine what pages need updating, deleting or otherwise. We also use Excel primarily to export our Google Analytics to in order for us to create reports for clients that need to see specific information about their traffic.
For teams and users who are very familiar with Excel and its mode of operation, Smartsheet will feel like a walkover. If you have a number of users who use Excel or Google Sheets for their personal project management then you will find this tool to be very useful and somewhat familiar.
Teams that may be used to other project management suites or styles would find Smartsheet a bit challenging to adapt to, as formulas and formatting can be challenging to adapt to.
It is very good at embedded formulas and tying cells to one another
It allows me to compare deals terms on a side-by-side basis and talk my clients through it easily.
It is very helpful as well in terms of allowing me to filter/sort results in many different ways depending on what specific information I am most interested in prioritizing.
Excel offers collaboration features that allow multiple users to work on the same spreadsheet, but managing changes made by different users can be challenging. Excel could improve its features by offering more granular control, better tracking of changes, and more robust conflict resolution tools.
Itcan be a barrier to productivity when importing and exporting data from other applications or file formats. To improve its features, it should offer better support for standard file formats and more robust error handling and reporting tools.
Excel can be challenging for finance students and working professionals, but it can be improved by offering more robust tutorials, better documentation, and more user communities and support forums.
Smartsheet set up is similar to Excel, yet when you upload an Excel file, things like conditional formatting are lost. Smartsheet has its own conditional formatting, and you have to reinstate the rules. It would be great if those would apply automatically once a file is uploaded
Some Smartsheet management and access rules can take some tweaking to work properly. This may be a case of offering more info to admins so they can apply these better and with more efficiency
Excel remains the industry standard for spreadsheets and has maintained simple and straight-forward formula writing methods. Although there is a learning curve to do more complex calculations, there are countless help sites and videos on the Internet for almost any need.
It definitely meets our needs as far as organizing and archiving our tasks and files. As we train more staff to view it, I see opportunities for more improvement, which I am sure this program can handle. I look forward to seeing continued improvement from Smartsheet on their capabilities and functionality.
I'm giving it a 7 because it is my go to. But the fact other prefer Google Sheets when working with a team does get irritating. I've used the online version of Microsoft Excel that other teams can get into and it still seems behind Google Sheets. It's a little clanky and slow? If that's even a term.
Smartsheet is very easy to learn. However, while I have been able to pick it easily, Microsoft Excel and Project super users that I have trained on Smartsheet get bogged down in the differences and can find it frustrating. Explaining the differences ahead of time and why Smartsheet is being chosen instead of a different software seems to counteract those reactions
I give this rating because it fills a niche in the market. MS Project scares many away from proper task management but there are limited tools our there, especially cloud-based that are mobile-friendly. Smartsheet fills this market gap, especially for small to medium-sized businesses. IT is not fair to compare it to MS Project, but fairer to see what gaps it fills.
It's absolutely paramount to take a few minutes to actually play with the software. It's nearly impossible to do anything wrong or make a mistake which cannot be fixed easily. Under the help menu is Live Training option. After you familiarize yourself with the commands, watch the live training for some in depth understanding of how to make the software fit your needs perfectly.
Out of Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Power BI, IBM SPSS, and Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel is by far the most common tool used for anything data-related across organizations. Accordingly, our organization has also implemented Microsoft Excel as a first-step tool. We recently adopted Microsoft Power BI (the free version), and use it occasionally (mostly for creating dashboards), but it is less commonly understood by stakeholders across our organization and by our clients. Accordingly, Microsoft Excel is more user-friendly and because of its popularity, we can easily look up how to do things in the program online. Google Sheets is a comparable alternative to Microsoft Excel, but because it's cloud-based and we have sensitive data that needs to be protected, we chose against using this software. Finally, a few users (including myself) have access to and utilize IBM's SPSS. For my role, it's a helpful tool to do more rigorous analyses. However, because of its cost and limited functionality as a simple spreadsheet, we only use it for more complex analyses.
Jira and Redmine are much more robust and technologically advanced project management solutions. I enjoy using either when managing a very large project. However, I prefer to use Smartsheet for my smaller to medium sized projects. As for Google Drive - I would say that Google sheets and Smartsheet are almost identical in my opinion when it comes to functionality. Personally I prefer to manage smaller projects via Google Drive, but it is a personal preference!
Each user can use it to whatever level of expertise they have. It remains the same so users can contribute to another's work regardless of whether they have more or less expertise
