MS Office v Google Docs
 

This topic is definitely on the fringes of "travel" technology, but since I use both programs on all of my portable devices (that travel with me), I'm starting the discussion here.

Here goes:

1. I started using Office when I was in high school during the 90s. IMO, the core products (Word, Excel, PPT) have remained essentially the same in terms of functionality ever since. In fact, if you made me use Office 95 today, I think I'd be pretty happy. Basically, with each new release, they completely overhaul the menu structures (you know, the stuff we spend 2 years getting used to), add a few more bells and whistles (10% of which are useful; e.g. track changes seems to be an area that they always improve), update integrations with external apps like Acrobat, and push more and more cloud connectivity upon us (more on this in point 4).

I remain an Office supporter because I know it well AND I can (still) save all files locally. Some of my colleagues call me a dinosaur because I prefer sending attachments instead of sharing files for them to edit. The thing is, I don't have to worry about mastering document control with Office 365 or Google Docs because my system works.

2. Google Docs was released in 2006, but it didn't gain significant traction with me until about 5 years later. Furthermore, for the next 5 years or so, whenever people sent me Google docs, my SOP was to download the files, improve them in Office, and re-upload new versions. This caused frustration among my colleagues but didn't really affect them in a material way.

3. More recently (i.e. 6 months ago), the company has made a stronger push for collaboration via Google Docs. I tried to resist, but they showed me a single example of me editing a document in Word butchering a watermark they spent hours perfecting. Furthermore, I'm hard-pressed to think of Office functions that Google Docs doesn't support. I'm still a bit uneasy about document control. However, as long as they're paying me, and I follow policy, that's not really my problem. As such, I now edit inside docs anytime someone else sends me a link. However, I continue to start my own documents in Office, send attachments, and hope that nobody migrates them to Google.

4. My biggest pet peeve with Google Docs is its constant pressure to get me to work in the cloud. While it's true that I'm online 90% of the time, Google is difficult to access in China (and some other countries) on occasion, and I simply like working offline when I need to focus. Second, I fear accidentally deleting/changing components of shared files; never an issue if I download, save as a new version, and enable track changes. Third, Google makes local saving about as difficult as imaginable (and I'm sure this trend will continue). For example, I was trying to grab a high-resolution image from a Google doc last week, and discovered that right-click-->save simply isn't an option. As an aside, if you encounter this issue, see here and use save as HTML: https://www.bettercloud.com/monitor/...s-google-docs/

5. My main defense of Office (locally stored files) seems to have been rapidly breaking down since the advent of Office 365. They initially gave all of us 1 tb of storage (each) and doubled that number earlier this year. Furthermore, they attempt to force us to save every document we work on to onedrive (with a local backup) so we can collaborate just like we do with Google Docs. My gut tells me this is going to be a failing effort, at least in my company's case, because Google got to the punch bowl first.

In closing, while I still prefer Office (mostly a familiarity thing at this point), I am starting to realize that adapting to current times is kind of necessary, especially since many younger people have no concept (at all) about the old ways.

I'm curious to hear your thoughts, and the following questions might be useful as guideposts (but, feel free to respond as you see fit):
-do you prefer Office, Google Docs, or something else?
-do you have a preference for cloud v local?
-what's your vision of the landscape 5 years out?

Like you, I have been using Office since the 90's at home and at work. I subscribed to Office 365 annually. But for my wife's home business, we decided to use Google Doc. She has workers all over the world. We can't provide everyone a copy of Excel. So Google Doc it is and it is great for they all have to share in the cloud.

Even though with Office, my files are saved locally on the hard drive, my document folder is sync to the cloud. I am working locally but backup in the cloud. I think Google Doc will take over for most people. My son's junior high and high school uses Chromebooks and google docs exclusively. We had some college interns at work and they had never used Office tools. I even use Google Doc for many of the things. I use the Google spreadsheet to keep my smoke alarms batteries change history, my oil change history (before I got EVs), and other time related stuff. It is just easier to pull it up on my phone to update instead of trying to get to my computer to run Excel.

I'm application agnostic (lots of suites/apps out there), but my beef these days is with cloud and cloud security. Unfortunately this is a component that many companies seem to forget. They don't keep the stuff they need to keep secure secured. You want to keep it in the cloud for convenience, go ahead, but secure your stuff first people... I can't tell you how many times people send me documents which should not be stored unencrypted through an unencrypted transmission and then when I purposely extract/update/secure the document before returning it to them, they get all upset.

My preference is local, but backed up to an enterprise resource once encrypted. Seen too many breaches to not take the additional few minutes to protect the stuff. And if the customers complain, fully ready to give them the spiel and ask them if it's worth the breaches.

As to your last "question", I suspect it's not going to get any better. I still see people in large corporations guilty of lax password management (generally a file somewhere with 11-15 passwords that they cut and paste) for critical infrastructure... the larger tech corporations trying to make things more convenient for users (and not considering the consequences)... Cloud files are great for convenience, but once they've been copied and spied upon.... good luck.

Drives me nuts.

I use MS Office on my employer laptop. I use Google docs on my client laptop. Either is fine for me. The cloud is my biggest dislike when traveling and using shared documents which I have downloaded. Uploading overwrites any edit/changes by coworkers.

• I use Office 365 at work and, like you, have since the early 90s. I have used Google Docs for a few social organizations for the past 10 years or so; honestly, I'm not a huge fan. Most of my beef comes with the sign-in requirements and remembering which Google account is supposed to be used with what file. I am a big fan (although only an occasional user) of Google Forms, though, and think that platform has a huge advantage in its integration.
• For most of my work products, for which security is not a huge concern, I prefer the cloud now. If you had asked me in 2019 I would have answered differently. It makes the hybrid work/home office with multiple computers transition more efficient. I do find it incredibly inconvenient when I cannot work offline, though!
• I still see Office with a sizeable market share in the corporate world, and I don't see that rapidly changing in my industry in five years. The professional/personal divide I have with Office/Google Docs seems relatively common among many in my 40-50 age range in this part of the world, and I could see a more significant shift in the longer term. For reference, I am in professional engineering/professional services consulting.

Long live Clippy.

I'm a teacher who has taught secondary students to use both MS Office & Google Workspace (or whatever they are calling it now).
Google has set the bar for cloud storage, sharing, and recovering past versions after an oopsie. Microsoft is slowly getting there.

Office has tons more features and tools than Google. (Try doing a mail merge in Google. Not gonna happen without grabbing third-party apps.) And some of the locations for stuff in Google are just... weird. (Have to go to FILE to change the page color? Huh?)

Overall, my impression of Google is that outside of a number of core competencies where they are world-class, everything else is half-assed. Google Classroom, for example, is complete poo.

With that said, Google is fine for 90% of the population. The other 10% is those who regularly use tools in Office that don't exist in Google.

I use both, but as someone who is nearing retirement, I still *strongly* prefer editing local copies of files, and storing locally where I have control over them.

Ultimately, "the cloud" is just a euphemism for "somebody else's computer". There is nothing magic about it. If network connectivity goes down, the cloud is gone. If the provider is hit with a significant DOS attack, the cloud is gone. If the provider gets hit with a ransomware attack, the cloud is gone. Depending on the level of importance, my documents are backed up to OneDrive, saved on my local hard drive, copied to an external SSD drive, and/or saved to a thumb drive.

Belt *and* suspenders, don'cha know...

For collaborating on files of any kind, Google is king. For Cloud use, Google is king.

Personally though, I am app agnostic. As long as it does what I want, I couldn't care less what the platform is.

Slight amendment... As a platform, Google (at least for me) ranks as the worst. So many gotchas there it's not funny.

Search for uBitMenu. An add-in to MS Office that reverts the interface to 2010. Bliss

And for me, Google docs.

We use MS Office and will always just buy the volume license and install it via that black screen thing--no idea what it's called, command prompt? Anyway, IT dude does it. 365 and cloud has zero appeal for me and I've insisted on avoiding any widespread integration of anything cloud based. For data that isn't sensitive, it's fine; but, not for anything even remotely confidential.

Never used Google, gmail or anything like that, and everything is saved to local HDs with a pre-determined schedule of zero-formatting erasing. Nothing private over email or texting, and I've always recommended to avoid putting anything important via text or email--I encourage everyone to use the phone.

Finally, I'm app agnostic too. Couldn't care less what we use, so long as it just works. Could be OpenOffice, Mac's iWords, etc...makes no difference to me--the only condition being no subscription or ongoing costs and no cloud stuff.

My prediction? Drobox is the future, and like FB et al, invest in it but don't ever use it.

PS - Not investment advice or recommendation to buy DBX or anything like that. Just random thoughts...all that jazz.

PS 2 - For personal convenience, I do use Sync, the Canadian one. I have zero trust when it comes to privacy from American firms, and Dropbox is only relegated to the free version where frivolous & unimportant files can be shared for pure convenience.

I'm not sure I'd still say that. MS has come a long ways with onedrive/office 365 on collaborating on files.

I also feel MS is moving more and more towards a cloud-first type thought process like google does. Their issue of course though is a lot of inertia from their customer base. (Which I can certainly understand the resistance.) For enterprises, they have versions of office 365 that are cloud only capable, and can only work on files that are stored on onedrive. My idiot university for the purposes of saving money likes to hire some non-full time staff and assign them these licenses, and then when you run into the problem of them not being able to edit local files, their answer is along the lines of "what, you haven't moved everything over to onedrive?", never mind the many shortcomings that has when it comes to retention.

I sense this too. The thing is, my company is firmly attached to Google's teat, and I assume many others are in the same boat. Even if MS were to offer us a free migration to their cloud, I can't imagine we'd bite. But, we'll continue to buy Office licenses for all, as long as they permit our guys to get work done offline.

Maybe MS had a chance to pounce ~10 years ago when MSN had serious traction, but that ship has sailed.

Windows is an obvious hook that they're clearly trying to leverage. Our IT people are pretty good at shielding us from this, though, and anyone who wants can have a Mac instead of a PC. On that note, I find it somewhat intriguing that Apple has steered clear of this market.

I recently switched to Mac after decades of Windows/MS and I was surprised. Is it better? No. It's different.

But, for me at least, Numbers/Pages does 95% of what I need, and it was free or low cost which matters when you're footing the bill.
I was apprehensive about the Mac forcing me to save stuff on iCloud, but in reality, it's not much different than Windows 10 in that iCloud is the first of many options, including local.

I find that Windows is much more suited to software development (Visual Studio/SSMS), analytics and number crunching (Excel) but for everything else, the Mac is just fine.

Google makes both uploading and downloading really hard.