An excellent comprehensive office suite for collaborative teams
May 24, 2018
An excellent comprehensive office suite for collaborative teams
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with G Suite
G Suite is being used by the entire organization as a general productivity office suite.
- The feature that stands out is the ease of collaboration by multiple users on the same documents. Aside from enabling simple, effective collaboration by a team, the real-time document editing and version control is great. G Suite users can access a document, make changes or suggest edits and each change will be flagged or highlighted, and even send notifications to other members of the shared document.
- It's comprehensive -- covers all four basic functions any general user needs -- Docs word processor, Slides presentation app, Sheets spreadsheet editor, and file storage platform Drive.
- Also the integration with Gmail and Google Calendar adds much efficiency to one's day to day work. Gmail is fast, and it has very effective search functionality. The Calendar has many added value features, such as automatic meeting creation based on email content, and can integrate with IT systems to book meeting rooms.
- If you're a Gmail user, then I find that it's useful that documents drafted in Docs can be copied and pasted into Gmail easily including with all formatting (e.g., bullets, indents, etc.) retained. Often when trying to paste text from Word to Gmail, all of the formatting is lost and I have to spend time reformatting within Gmail. Thus, if you're a power Gmail user, then using Docs can be a major time saver.
- Sheets the spreadsheet app simply isn't as robust or fully featured as Microsoft Excel. Frankly there's no real comparison, Excel is superior aside from the multi-user collaboration features of G Suite. If you need a powerful spreadsheet to handle complex number crunching and large data imports and exports, then Excel likely is the better product for you. But Sheets is great if your needs are relatively basic.
- Similarly, Docs does not have the same full functionality of Microsoft Word if you're working on long, complex documents that require a lot of formatting. In particular I've found that Word's redline / compare documents feature is much better than Docs. Again the key benefit of Docs is the sharing and collaboration functionality, but it can't compare in terms of total features offered by Word. However, for the vast majority of tasks, Docs is an adequate and effective solution.
- G Suite has a positive ROI simply from the time savings gained from effective collaboration through use of the real-time sharing and collaborative editing features. $10 or less per month is a cheap price to pay for those gains in efficiency and better communication between team members.
G Suite is much better at collaboration and sharing. Microsoft 365 has superior spreadsheet (Excel) and word processor (Word) applications, and arguably a better presentation app as well (PowerPoint vs. Presentation). However, I do prefer Gmail and Google Calendar over Outlook.
Ultimately, they're both comprehensive and fully featured suites of applications and you can't go wrong with either solution -- you just have to decide whether you value collaboration/sharing vs. the benefit of having the richer functionality of Word and Excel.
Ultimately, they're both comprehensive and fully featured suites of applications and you can't go wrong with either solution -- you just have to decide whether you value collaboration/sharing vs. the benefit of having the richer functionality of Word and Excel.