I'm not an Excel jockey but friends who are testify to its power and flexibility.
I use Word a lot and the ease of use still beats gdoc's. For example, the macros and the "customize keyboard" options are great. cmd-l for "next edit," cmd-j for "accept and move on," cmd-; for "reject change." The speed is paramount.
Word and Excel, like Photoshop, are dominant because of their maturity as well as the muscle memory of their users.
People were pissed 18 years ago when the Office ribbon was implemented because it broke their workflow. MS might have gussied it up now, but they haven’t dared to reinvent it since.
Same here - there are 1000 options, across 15 tabs, and I have to look through all the icons and labels till I find the one, with active tab and even displayed options changing depending on content selection.... It's a constant battle if you don't spend hours a day in MS apps and develop muscle memory.
I do realize that there are probably no ideal UIs for accessing such a breadth of options, and it was a valid attempt, but not really successful, imo. With some adjustment and practice by users, I believe something like Alfred within the app, with smart search and suggestions, would be a quicker and more efficient approach for tool activation. Since there has to be also a good way to discover features without explicitly searching for them, maybe something like the Start menu is the right approach - quick search, but also categories and lists of tools.
The search bar is excellent and being keyboard driven fast too.
The ribbon is also entirely keyboard-drivable and fast that way. I’ve seen the data on why it was introduced; it was a scaling issue- the old toolbars simply could no longer fit all the functionality in apps like Excel, so they made them context-aware.
Importantly: The ribbon also makes the shortcut chords discoverable, so people can find shortcuts for the stuff they use often by themselves. It lets you get at tons of functions both as a first-timer discovering stuff visually, as well as a seasoned veteran with keyboard alone. There's some things they could polish a bit (colour pickers, mainly), but the system is overall really good.
To be fair, or maybe only in my opinion (but i had a teacher who agreed with me so :/), from at least 2008 until at least 2012 (So from when i discovered how nice it was until after i quit using word/openoffice entirely and only used Latex), OpenOffice/libreoffice templating features were more powerful than word's, although less intuitive.
Gdoc is shitty however and i don't see how/why i want to use it over any competitors. I think i prefer Nextcloud's editor, even without the privacy/data mining consideration, and i really think that could be improved.
Gdoc is better than Jira and Confluence editor though, and better than the standard redmine editor froma few years ago (the non-markdown one), so that's nice.
I can buy all of this. I've periodically played around with Libre Office on MacOS and usually found the text rendering leaves something to be desired. It's one of these things that I'm glad exists and yet don't really use.
edit: I just downloaded the latest version and the text rendering looks good! Now time to see how it handles dark mode (white or green text, black background).
A lot of productivity type people on Twitter are to some extent slaves to fashion, and in that world eg. Microsoft just doesn't exist. Cool people don't use it, so we end up in a comedy world where ostensible productivity experts gush over random startups' products while M365 is like six times the size of Google Workspace, which again dwarfs all the startups by itself. It gets really silly sometimes when they start gushing about like, a new way to make slide decks. Then you read some essay about all the ways GSlides is torture, and you start to understand.
I'm not an Excel jockey but friends who are testify to its power and flexibility.
I use Word a lot and the ease of use still beats gdoc's. For example, the macros and the "customize keyboard" options are great. cmd-l for "next edit," cmd-j for "accept and move on," cmd-; for "reject change." The speed is paramount.