I'm a heavy Excel user, and I have yet to find a usecase that cannot be solved in Sheets. It has App Script after all, for whenever you run into a feature that isn't there. But even then, I've translated many Excel functions to native Sheets array_formula equivalents, and found the latter much more ergonomic.

> But if you already know Excel, why would you add another product for some subset of use cases?

I know Excel – I've been using Excel since before Sheets existed. First spreadsheet I ever used was Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS (I was just a kid at the time, so I was just mucking around with it, not using it in anger – but I remember watching my father use it in anger.)

At my work everyone gets Sheets, whereas you only get an Excel license if you specifically request one – and most people don't. So why would I use the product which most of my colleagues don't have, instead of the product everybody has?

Likewise on my personal laptop, I have an Excel license... and still I use Sheets for most things. Habit maybe? I've never used the web-based Excel, and I don't like having to deal with open another app.

The only time I ever use Excel nowadays is if I need to open some complex Excel spreadsheet that Sheets can't handle properly, or if I need to work on some Excel spreadsheet import/export function at work – both of which are "once in a blue moon" activities for me.

I've only watched an Excel expert work their magic in person once and it was straight up sorcery. I'm glad not to need to learn it, but it was eye-opening seeing her rapidly make changes (with me not understanding what she was doing, sorta how non-experts likely perceive what we do when we help them with their personal devices) and come out with exactly what she wanted. Must have taken her about a minute and there were changes every several seconds until she was done.

Black magic in the hands of an experienced user.

In the case of Google Sheets, one reason is that collaborative editing in M365 Excel is absolutely awful. It’s slow, clunky, and more importantly loses data. If you have a shared spreadsheet with important data in it, it’s worth switching.

I’ve worked with a “prototype CRM” that was just a big Google Sheet. Basically a lead generation form would add a row to the sheet, and the sales team would edit cells to reflect the state of the sale. It grew to 3 million rows and still worked. Doing that in Excel is a laughable idea.

I’ve also been on a management team where compensation planning was done with ten managers editing a shared Excel sheet with just a few hundred rows. Somehow some rows got deleted and others got slightly scrambled during the process. It was a huge mess.