Excel vs Google Sheets

Excel vs Google Sheets at a glance

Both Excel and Google Sheets are powerful spreadsheet tools, but they're optimised for different workflows. Excel is the deeper, more performant engine — better for heavy financial modelling, large datasets, and Power Query / Power Pivot. Google Sheets is the lighter, collaboration-first choice — better for teams that live in a browser, need real-time editing, and want simple sharing. For most modern businesses, the answer isn't 'one or the other' — it's picking the right tool per use case, and using AI to generate the underlying spreadsheet either way.

Business templates and reporting

Excel still wins for serious financial templates: P&L statements, three-statement models, loan amortisation, complex KPI dashboards. The formula engine is faster on large ranges, and Power Query lets you reshape messy data without writing code. Google Sheets is excellent for living business documents that several people update each week — content calendars, sales pipelines, OKR trackers, hiring dashboards.

Invoices and client deliverables

Excel is the safer pick when the deliverable is a polished invoice or proposal that goes to a finance team — PDF exports keep formatting consistent and clients almost always have Excel installed. Google Sheets is better when invoices are sent as a live link that the client can comment on.

CRM and project tracking

• Google Sheets: better for lightweight CRMs and project trackers because of real-time editing, comments, and easy permissions.
• Excel: better when the tracker needs to slice thousands of rows with pivot tables or feed a dashboard.
• Both: support drop-down lists, conditional formatting, and formula-driven status columns.

Budgets and forecasting

For monthly budgets and rolling forecasts that live inside one team, Google Sheets is usually enough. For multi-tab financial models with scenario analysis, Excel's calculation engine and named ranges are still the gold standard.

Collaboration and access

• Google Sheets: real-time multi-user editing, comments, suggestions, and version history baked in.
• Excel: real-time co-authoring works through Microsoft 365, but desktop Excel is still the most common workflow.
• Sharing: Google Sheets wins on link-based sharing; Excel wins when files need to live on a corporate file server.

AI-assisted spreadsheet creation

This is where the comparison gets interesting. Instead of building either spreadsheet from a blank grid, you can describe what you need and let AI build it for you. Sehnna generates real .xlsx files that open in both Excel and Google Sheets — so you don't have to pick a side up front. You can prompt 'monthly marketing budget with planned vs actual' once and use the output in whichever tool your team prefers.

Which one should your business pick?

• Pick Excel if: heavy financial modelling, large datasets, Power Query / Power Pivot, polished client deliverables.
• Pick Google Sheets if: multi-user editing, lightweight trackers, content calendars, fast sharing.
• Pick both, and let AI generate the file: use Sehnna to create the spreadsheet, then open it wherever the work happens.