Other than the usual developer tools the only desktop based app I use is Excel and every few months I try to wean myself away. I love being able to keep all my text docs and slideshows online and have them accessible and sharable anywhere. The best part is updating the content without having to worry about bombarding people with yet another email.

I tried doing the same with Google Sheets and it works for smaller tables but as soon as you get tables with thousands of rows it’s noticeably slower than Excel. It’s amazing for what it can do but it feels as if the browser just can’t handle the rendering nor the calculation that a large spreadsheet entails. Some of the time closing and reopening the table fixes the problem but this is too reminiscent of Windows in the 90s and ends up in a glacial pace after a few minutes of work. I continue to use Google Sheets for small, collaborative files but for anything larger or anything that will need heavy computation I’ll switch to Excel. I’ve also been using R for more repetitive analyses but for the quick and dirty analysis that comes from the result of a SQL query Excel is still king.