Google's docs instead of MS Office

Woden

Woden

Woden

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Oldham, Lancashire
Basically, my student's 365 sub ends at some point this year, so its either pay up or move on.

Just how good is Google these days? I use Excel a lot and don't want to loose to many features, though I don't mind re-learning.

Excel just works for the most part, especially with adding/subtracting a date and time. Need to track that overtime!
 
Woden said:
Basically, my student's 365 sub ends at some point this year, so its either pay up or move on.

Just how good is Google these days? I use Excel a lot and don't want to loose to many features, though I don't mind re-learning.

Excel just works for the most part, especially with adding/subtracting a date and time. Need to track that overtime!
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It's okay if you're not doing anything that impressive. Not as good, though. Plus they're basically doing it for data mining purposes. There's a reason one costs money and the other doesn't.

I pay for a 365 subscription. I like having the downloaded versions of the software and it's just worth it for me for my time. I would honestly prefer to just use LibreOffice rather than Google's office if that were the choice.
 
I use Google Apps for Work for one of my domains which is the paid version of the Google apps suite. I find it excellent. The fact that I don't need to worry about copying my files over to my NAS or uploading them to some other cloud storage with another company is an excellent feature for me. Plus it comes with a custom email address using my domain name.

It also gives you a second account so you can have personal accounts and business accounts for things like YouTube, Google+, Adsence, Adwords, Analytics and the many other Google services is excellent.

It only costs £3.30 (excl VAT) so even if you only use it for Google Apps, Google Drive and a custom email address it is well worth it. You also get 30GBs of storage through Google Drive rather than the 15GBs you get on the free Google Drive service.
 
My previous employer tried getting everyone to use it but personally I found it to be a pain. Lots of documentation but it was always out of date referring to options that no longer existed. The whole sharing docs was a nightmare as they would just disappear and users were losing important projects. I ended up using Office for Mac but Outlook was terrible. I never thought i would be so happy to see Windows and Office again when i changed jobs :D
 
Beerbaron said:
The whole sharing docs was a nightmare as they would just disappear and users were losing important projects.
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Strange. I've never had that issue at all. The only time when shared documents disappear is if the user sharing them changes the permissions on the document. I've had documents shared with me for years and they have never disappeared (unless the person deleted the document of course).

I do have Microsoft Office 2013 on stand by in case I need it but 99% of the time I just use Google Docs unless there is a feature I really need (sometimes I just have to use Excel for something).
 
Cromulent said:
I use Google Apps for Work for one of my domains which is the paid version of the Google apps suite. I find it excellent. The fact that I don't need to worry about copying my files over to my NAS or uploading them to some other cloud storage with another company is an excellent feature for me. Plus it comes with a custom email address using my domain name.

It also gives you a second account so you can have personal accounts and business accounts for things like YouTube, Google+, Adsence, Adwords, Analytics and the many other Google services is excellent.

It only costs £3.30 (excl VAT) so even if you only use it for Google Apps, Google Drive and a custom email address it is well worth it. You also get 30GBs of storage through Google Drive rather than the 15GBs you get on the free Google Drive service.
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Well if you're looking at paid, Office 365 Essentials package is only £3.10 and the OP wont have to switch from Office. And you also get 1TB OneDrive storage with it. Though I have a slightly more expensive package that lets me have downloaded versions of the software on multiple PCs which for me is well worth it.

But I figured we were going with free only, in which case as bledd points out, you can still use the free online versions of MS Office.

OP - can you get your employer to pay for it or, if self-employed / contracting, do it as a business expense? Business package of O365 is £84 at the moment:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/smb/products/office-365/
 
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h4rm0ny said:
Well if you're looking at paid, Office 365 Essentials package is only £3.10 and the OP wont have to switch from Office. And you also get 1TB OneDrive storage with it. Though I have a slightly more expensive package that lets me have downloaded versions of the software on multiple PCs which for me is well worth it.

But I figured we were going with free only, in which case as bledd points out, you can still use the free online versions of MS Office.

OP - can you get your employer to pay for it or, if self-employed / contracting, do it as a business expense? Business package of O365 is £84 at the moment:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/smb/products/office-365/
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True. I guess the paid version of O365 is also an option but I always overlook that because I have a physical copy of Office 2013 Professional so I don't need to pay a subscription fee to use it. I always found the email in Google Apps for Work better because it supports DKIM which last time I used O365 it didn't support. Because of that you can also use DMARC and along with SPF it dramatically helps with email deliverability.

But I guess which ever one you use it will be a good solution.
 
I'll give Libre/apache a go. It's already in my Ubuntu install anyway. I guess formulas are different and I lose macros though.
 
I use Libre office at home. Spreadsheets isn't as good as excel (still does the basics), but the Word equivalent seems fine.
 
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