Where Google Sheets shines

Google Sheets and Excel overlap a great deal, but Sheets has particular strengths that make it the better choice for many teams. Knowing them helps you design workbooks that play to those strengths.

Strengths of Sheets

• Real time collaboration: many people can edit at once, see each other's cursors and comment on cells. There is no file to email around.
• Always online and always saved: version history records every change, so you can see who changed what and restore earlier versions.
• Connected to Google Workspace: Google Forms responses land directly in a sheet, and Gmail, Calendar and Drive can be automated with Apps Script.
• Formulas that return whole tables: functions like FILTER, UNIQUE, QUERY and ARRAYFORMULA produce entire result tables from one formula.
• Live connections between files: IMPORTRANGE pulls data from another spreadsheet and keeps it updated.
• Free scripting: Google Apps Script, based on JavaScript, runs in Google's cloud with no installation.

Where Sheets is weaker

• Very large datasets: spreadsheets have a cell limit and can become slow well before reaching it, especially with many complex formulas.
• Some advanced analysis and modelling features that Excel offers, such as certain Power Query and Power Pivot capabilities.
• Offline work, which is possible but less smooth.

For a shared operations tracker, a team dashboard or anything fed by forms, Sheets is often ideal.

The events company workbook

Throughout the course we use a workbook for a small events company:

1. Bookings: responses from a Google Form where clients request events.
2. Clients: a list of client companies with contact details and account managers.
3. Pricing: packages and prices by event type and guest numbers.
4. Report: a weekly summary for managers.

Today, someone copies data between these sheets by hand every week, and mistakes are common. By the end of the course, formulas and a script will do it all.

Formulas that spill

A key idea in this course is that one formula can fill many cells. Type this in an empty cell:

=SEQUENCE(5)

Sheets fills five cells with the numbers 1 to 5. The formula lives only in the first cell; the rest are its results. If anything blocks those cells, you get a #REF! error explaining that the result would overwrite data. Leave empty space below and to the right of formulas like this.

Make a copy of the course workbook from the resources link so you can edit it freely.