Can Google Sheets Beat Excel: Microsoft MVP David Benaim Settles the Debate

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Welcome back to the MC65 show. Today we are diving into one of the biggest debates in

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that spreadsheet world. Can Google sheets really beat Microsoft Exel? Joining me is David

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Benay, Microsoft Exel MVP, trainer, content creator and even the stand-up comedian who proves

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spreadsheets don't have to be boring. David is known for his weekly tutorials covering

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Exel, Google sheets, power query, power BI and the latest productivity tools. I had to

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involve professionals working smarter with data. In this episode we are comparing Exel and

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Google sheets by feature exploring how AI is changing the way we work with spreadsheets,

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discuss Microsoft latest innovation and find out whatever Google sheets is really. I don't

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mean this Google sheets based, so I'm really, yeah, I think I can really learn a lot of new

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stuff. So yeah, welcome David. Thank you for being here and show. Yeah, happy to be here.

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Thank you for inviting me. I'm excited. Yeah, I think that's interesting. You're not

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only in Microsoft, NDP or you are also a standard comedian. Can you a little bit tell us why

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or how you get what brings you, I don't know if it's using Exel, but what brings you to

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standard comedian? So I've always enjoyed entertaining people and presenting. I love

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PowerPoints almost as much as spreadsheets. And over the years I have been doing some jokes

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amongst friends and then someone I knew was offering a stand-up course, so I thought I

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gave it a try. And that went pretty well. And then my second set that I ever wrote, I decided

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to write about spreadsheets because it's Monday and it's kind of, oh well, I wonder how

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they can make spreadsheets funny, but also it's something that's so inherent in pretty much

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everyone's life. If you're an office worker, you are using spreadsheets. You might hate them,

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you might love them, you might love to hate them. You might be sneakily proud of that formula

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that you created and your entire company is running off this macro that you wrote 20 years

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ago, even though you left the company and now they need to come back to you to fix it.

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So I wrote a little bit, that was about five minutes worth of jokes, it went badly, but then

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I wrote again and it went well and it went better and better and then I decided to combine

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the two. So now I go by the mantle, the Excel comedian and I have a one hour comedy show

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called Excel Comedy and Mathematics that has had spelled out seasons at the Edinburgh

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Friends and Adelaide French festivals, which is the two largest performing arts festivals

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in the world. And I'm bringing it back to Edinburgh Friends this summer, also going to

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go to Stockholm and Estonia for a few shows there. So yeah, if you're interested, come check

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out the show. I'm super excited to bring this back to Europe.

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Yeah, this is really interesting. Let's see. I never heard before about it, but I think

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yeah, both people are more, I don't know, more, more, more, very band-aid to work with Excel.

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But yeah, it's, it's, I think, the best, what you can do, have a smile on it. And how, how

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was your journey into the Excel or the Microsoft world?

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It was good. So I became an accountant straight out of university and my Excel skills there

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were medium for a accountant level, but not as good as you would think. Like we knew how

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to use pivot tables, but we didn't really know formulas beyond ifs and sums and averages.

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So I can do a V look up, I can do a sum if, then after that, I left to do a volunteering job

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with an organization called Accounting for International Development. Kind of like doctors

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without borders, but instead of saving lives, we saved balance sheets. So they offered me

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a position for a two months in a nonprofit based in Cambodia. And I did that and I helped

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them with their annual budget, but one of the things that they wanted to help with was talking

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about Excel. So a little bit of teaching Excel and the people I was showing it to didn't know

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how to use stuff like filtering or pivot tables. So that was able to teach, but then they

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started asking more questions and trying to, we got some stuff to be able to answer them.

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And over the course of my time there, I had some free time. So I just took a genuine interest

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in it and started learning it more. And then over the next year, I decided, well, maybe I can start

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a business in Cambodia because I enjoy living here, talking about accounting systems and software,

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but also this Excel training, my legs. So I ended up buying a bunch of books and learning pretty much

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everything that was to know about Excel and Word and PowerPoints and just be an absolute expert in it.

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And then since then I have kept up to date with everything. So I am probably the person that keeps

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the most up to date with the largest array of business software. I have a blog post that I publish

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once a quarter, which is the most comprehensive, what's new in tech as a business professional blog post.

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So I don't go into the development stuff. I go into what's new inside the apps that I use as a

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non-tech person. It might be Zoom, it might be Teams, it might be ChatGVT, it might be obviously Excel or

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Power BI or Google Sheets or Word or Canber, all that stuff. PowerPoints, Microsoft Teams, OneDrive.

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So I published that once a quarter and along the way I became an MVP six years ago in 2020,

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right as COVID was hitting. Yeah, a lot of people say Excel is dead. Is it now and undead? Is it still alive?

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What will you say among Excel? So people have been saying Excel is dead for the last 20 years.

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And if it's not that today, then I don't think it's going anywhere. I think that even in the age of AI,

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Excel continues to be the place where everyone clips the export to Excel button from whatever system

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they're using from anything that they've had a custom app built. They will still want to be able to

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play around with the data and type a number in a cell without any restrictions and add that number to

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whatever it is your report gives, be it for a percentage markup or just an adjustment for one

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specific day. And Excel is the only thing that lets people do that. Every other system is way too

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restricted. Well, spreadsheets, we are talking about Google Sheets as well. So yeah, spreadsheets in

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general allow for that flexibility that I think the office employee is going to want for the very,

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very foreseeable future. Now Excel is being, it is being changed the way people are using spreadsheets

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based on AI, but the Excel is dead mantra. Absolutely no, not for a very, very long time.

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Yeah, when we talk about we have this, yeah, I think Google comes for, I don't know, a few years

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and then bring Google Sheets. What do you say or why do

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why Google Sheets get so underestimated?

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So a few reasons. Looking back at history, Excel was the underdog when it first got launched in 1985.

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Excel is currently 40 years old. So I'll rate it 40th birthday last September. Before that, it was

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Lotus 123 and Excel had to prove its place because Lotus 123 was the one that every one went,

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this is before my work, lifetime and probably yours as well, but it was what was around a long time ago.

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And then Excel overtook it because Excel had a better graphical user interface for the most part,

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kind of where it came to be, but they took a lot of the same features, including a lot of the

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problematic features they took from Lotus 123. And then Excel was the only game in town for a while.

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There was Apple numbers, but that was only for a select few people in the workplace. Apple

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wasn't really being prominent outside of graphic design and video editing. So Excel continued to be

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very, very prominent. And Excel did exist for Mac. In fact, Excel 1.0 was actually released on Mac

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and not on Windows, Windows didn't exist at the time. So fast forward, Google is this up-and-coming

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search engine. They start to do a productivity thing. They release Google Docs, which everyone is like,

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oh, this is nice. I can actually share it with people. And there isn't that much advanced technology

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in in word and document writing. Well, there is, but most of there is only for very, very small number

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of users. And then they released the whole suite and Google seats was not very good. They can do

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very much. It had a lot of shortcomings. It was very, very limited. But you could share it. You could

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share it with people anywhere. That was done really, really well. So over time, people ended up using

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Excel for the workplace, perhaps for everything in the workplace for Google sheets for anything

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personal, anything casual, anything you wanted to share with friends, planning a trip,

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planning a dinner party. You just wanted an easy spreadsheet where people could type in

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things in frozen columns. Easy to share doesn't need advanced functionality. Over the years,

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though, Google seats had developed way more functionality and it could do more and more things.

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And when it first got, if first got goods, I'd say it was probably around 15 years ago,

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it started to not only match most of what Excel could do, but even bypass it in certain realms,

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which is what will get too soon, because I think that is really important. And most people are not

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aware that that is the case. And I am someone that is always open to trying out new software.

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And we'll use the right software for the right job. And so in certain times in my consulting

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work where I've helped to do some spreadsheet software building, I have recommended Google seats

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because some things it just does better than Excel. And that's something that is important. Now,

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I am probably the person who has published the most comprehensive Excel versus Google

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sheets blog post ever. I published this a couple years ago, on LinkedIn. And it goes through

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all the similarities and most importantly, all the differences because Google beats can do many

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things better than Excel. Excel can do many things better than Google sheets. There is a Venn diagram,

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depends what your needs are, which you should go for. What's on your side? What's the main feature

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or what do is Google sheets better than Excel and what do is Excel better than Google sheets?

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What's the highlights? That's a big question. We can go through, we can go through a step-by-step,

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I guess. So I would say that when it comes to when it comes to setting up robust tables,

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Google sheets is better. Both of them have a feature called table, which I think is an awful name

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for a feature because no one ever looks up, how do I create a table in Excel? And from my experience,

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having done Excel training to over 3,000 people and had over 3 million views on my YouTube channel,

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people don't know how to use this feature called a table, which means they're missing out on one

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of the most important features that spreadsheets has to offer. However, Google sheets is slightly

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better than Excel's is better for naming conventions and it also has a group-by-viewing. So

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what a lot of people love doing is creating sub-totals in tables. And this is a bit technical, I guess,

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but if you do that, then you're going to lead to loads of double counting errors. And this happens

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in business all the time. As I said, I started my career as an accountant. That was something we

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always looked out for because it always happens. That's the double counting. Whereas Google

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sheets has a feature called group-by, where you can create a group-by-view that can show you the sub-totals

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for the user, but that data doesn't actually exist anywhere apart from in what you view it.

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So it's a lot better. That feature only came out about a year and a half, so you really like it.

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Yeah, when we think about, well, I think, I don't know, it's right, actually, but the most companies

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are still using Excel when they don't switch to Google sheets when it's better.

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So, I mean, there's a couple of things to play. Like, I don't think Google sheets is better than

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Excel. I think that Excel has power query and power query is absolutely game-changing.

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And for that reason, until Google sheets has an equivalent, I will favor Excel. However,

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the majority of business users don't use power query or power pivot to return in Excel.

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Well, I mean, ultimately, a company will do what their company provides. And since everyone is

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paying for a Microsoft license already, they have Excel. They're not paying for a Google workspace.

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But what I found is in smaller organizations in the developing world where I live,

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I find Google does have more prominence than if I go to corporate London, for example,

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many people have never heard of Google sheets or they think it's just absolutely awful.

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They wouldn't even consider it as a competitor. But I think that that's the problem is because

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people don't consider it as a competitor that they don't end up using many of the features.

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That could be available. It's not just Google sheets. More players are launching

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worksheets as spreadsheet applications. So, can Velasteel launch a spreadsheet application

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called Canva Sheets. And last month in June, 26, Zoom meetings launched a spreadsheet as well.

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So, I would say those ones know a near comparative with Excel, Google sheets. But they have their

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use cases, especially Canva Sheets. Canva Sheets is good if you want to essentially take one design

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and then create a spreadsheet which can then replicate that same thing, but switching out this picture

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for another picture, switching out names, switching out other titles or images or something like that.

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It can work really, really well for that. That's not really what Google sheets in Excel can do,

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but Canva will link up its spreadsheet tool with its graphic design tools to make it stronger.

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I use it for that quite a bit because I do a lot of graphic design for my comedy stuff.

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So, that's something to bear in mind. So, yeah, essentially, I think people are still using Excel

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because that's what their company pays for the most. And also because they're lazy to learn

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a new user interface. And they still think that Google Sheets had the capabilities that it had

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20 years ago. This is not the case. This is okay. But the real time collaboration is,

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this is still Google's biggest advantage. This is right. Or is it any more so?

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So, Excel will say that they have real-time collaboration and they do, but it's buggy, it crashes a lot,

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it tells you it doesn't record its changes. Google has never had an issue.

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Google, you can use it on the browser and it's completely fine. Yeah, it is very, very strong for that.

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But Excel on paper does pretty much the same thing and has done for about almost 10 years now,

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even on Excel desktop. Some people don't realize that, but if you have a file shaved on SharePoint or

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OneDrive, you can have other people edit it in Excel desktop at the same time. But then it doesn't

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work with people outside your organization. As I said, it crashes a lot. So, Google does still do

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that better. And one thing I like about Google's approach in general is that it doesn't punish you

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if you are outside the organization. Me as a consultant who tends to work solo with

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clients, companies that hire me as an external consultant. I can work in Google's infrastructure

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and I can get all the same features. But if I try to do that and that my client is a Microsoft

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infrastructure, I join a team's call and I can't see the name of the people writing things into the chat.

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I can't record things. I can't, I can't do emoji reactions or vote in the polls sometimes.

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And I definitely cannot edit a spreadsheet at the same time as that. They have to add me as an

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external user. It just puts up way more boundaries. Whereas Google is much easier to collaborate with

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people across multiple organizations. And that is I think, I think for the better for people like me,

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my kind of workplace. Yeah. Yeah, let's say, um,

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Excel and Google are our rappers who are excellent, who is, is, is, is Google's sheets.

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Sorry, what was that question? Yeah, but when you mentioned, I don't know, I don't know,

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are rappers or, or, or, or, or sport arts? What will you say? What is, um, what a sport is,

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is, is Excel and what are four kind of sport as Google's sheets?

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Sorry, I, I still didn't know the question. What, what, what, what, what, yeah, no, no, but when you,

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have a mind that, that you give, you say, oh, what, what, I don't know, how, how, how, when we compare it

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in, in real life, uh, yeah, uh, Excel and, and, and, and Google's sheets. So, but we take something,

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I don't know, like, like sports is, it's, it's, it's, at Google sheets more basketball and, uh,

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I don't know, uh, Excel more, more golfing or how will you compare it? Oh, okay. So if that puts,

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I would say, I would say, maybe, Google sheets would be more of a team sport, something like,

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let's go with Google sheets is more like synchronized swimming. Okay.

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Well, you're all kind of going together and working at the same time and collaborating and

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what everyone is doing in a real time affects the other person, whereas Excel is maybe more of like,

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a swimming relay race, where it works very well as long as there's only one person playing at

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the same time. And, and, and accurately, it's, it's a little bit, we have this, this AI topics, um,

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and, and we have, I don't know, co-pilot for, for, for Excel, uh, and we have, uh, a lot of, a lot of,

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a lot of AI tools from, from, from Google, how, how did they compare their in, in, in, in, yeah, in,

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in, in staying with, yeah, yeah. Good question. I think when it comes to AI, both Microsoft and Google,

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kind of failed in the first launches, but I think that it's pretty well accepted, the co-pilot

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kind of sucked. And I'll talk about, look at that, today I'll get to that, but I think that the,

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the implementation of co-pilot, where the pricing plans were confusing, where

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me who had co-pilot as pretty much as soon as they came out, I found little to no use for it in

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spreadsheets. And, Google, Google has gone through multiple iterations of what it calls its, its AI.

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Engine, now it's calling it Gemini, the first one that it launched also came up with issues,

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and then they had to pull it back and then relaunch it. You had then chat, you be tea, and chat,

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you be tea really took me initiative and became the thing that revolutionized AI and that everyone sees

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as AI today. And then he had Claude, which was a competitor that came in, she went afterwards,

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although earlier this year it became evident that almost all the techies were like, oh, Claude is

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the way to go, Claude is the one. And then Claude implemented an Excel add-in. And that Excel add-in

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could just do way more than Excel's co-pilot could do. It actually answered the questions. Excel

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co-pilot would tell you, I can't do that, I can't do that. Oh, you want to change the color of

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cells? Here's how you can do it. Or, oh no, I can't do that action. And it would just give you a lot

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of incorrect stuff. Yeah. Then what happened? Well, Excel released its co-pilot Excel agents,

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which has now been renamed to Editing co-pilot, but that could then rival similar stuff to what

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Claude could do. And now that is pretty, pretty awesome. It's pretty revolutionary. I love doing

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demos where I showcase how it can do stuff, how it can clean data, how it can do things through formulas,

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how it can grab data from different things, do on-mass data research. For example, you could type out

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a list of your favorite movies and then it can look up like what the box office revenue was,

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who the actors are, what your was released, things like that, just on-mass data entry.

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And then Google released something else, released Gemini inside Google Sheets. And earlier this

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year, they did that. And that has some player benefits over what all of the others in Excel can do,

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which I think is completely under looked. It is behind a paywall. They did give me free access

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to it for a while. And then I was showcasing it in a webinar and they took away that free access.

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So about about a day before I was doing the webinar, I realized I had to purchase the software to

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get it to keep going. But I was showing the webinar about AI and spreadsheet, so it was definitely

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well worth it. And yeah, it can do some really cool things. So for example, you've got something

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called a canvas. This came out a couple of months ago in Google Sheets. And essentially you can use

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Google Sheets to act as a user interface through various different types of interactive charting,

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things like a can bandboard, which Trello is very commonly known as. So you can have a canvas that

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has a complete user interface like that, really easy to set up. And then you can drag and drop things

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and the background is in a spreadsheet in Google Sheets somewhere. And if you change it in the

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spreadsheet, it will change in the board, the can bandboard, if you change it in the can bandboard,

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it will change in the spreadsheet. You can also have a calendar view. So if you have if you have dates,

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the canvas can show a calendar view or various other types of data visualization. And another thing

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that Google Sheets does is smart fill. Uh-huh. Everyone knows that in spreadsheets on the bottom right,

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you can drag down a cell and that will bring down a formula or copy down what you have.

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Google Sheets has, sorry, that's on the on the bottom right. Google Sheets has added another thing

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on the bottom left that you can drag down. And that will actually give you context of whatever it is

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the table is showing. So for example, in the example I gave earlier about the movies,

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you could just have a list of the movies and then you could have a title for

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for box office revenue. You could have a column title or

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movie release dates for Rotten Tomatoes go and then you don't even have to type a formula. You'd

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have to type a prompt. You can just left click and drag down from the cell and it will do all that

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research for you in seconds. So I think that is really cool. I do think over time though they're all

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gonna copy each other. I think Gemini in Google Sheets and Excel co-pilot and called for Excel

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and chat to be T for Excel. They're all going to continue to copy each other and that's kind of for

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the better of the spreadsheet development world. I guess they're all gonna continue to come up with

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new ideas and copy each other. But for now, for me, I think that Google Gemini kind of is pretty good

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at doing those two extra things. Yeah, I think how different are the formulas in

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I don't know how it's written in Google Sheets but in Excel, the R is a really powerful,

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is it the same on Google Sheets? So good question. When I wrote a big blog post comparing the two of

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them a couple of years ago, my headline figure was that country to what everyone believes,

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Google Sheets actually has more functions than Excel. Not fewer, Google Sheets has more functions

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than Excel. And yes, probably about 95% of the functions exist in both of the of the software's.

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But the ones that only exist in Excel and don't exist in Google Sheets, I don't really think

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that that could. But there are some they only exist in Google Sheets, don't exist in Excel.

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That's have some benefits. For example, you've got the query function, which allows you to query a

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dataset and use kind of SQL type code and return outputs inside multiple rows and columns.

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You've got, yeah, quite a few more like that. Although I will say that Excel has since released

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some extra functions, which are pretty good for Google Sheets doesn't have yet. So the equals

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group by and equals pivot by functions were both releasing Excel about a year ago and they allow

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you to create pivot tables inside spreadsheets through formulas, which are really, really good.

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Excel also has for the last year or so integrated Python into it. So that will be,

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you give that an edge for people who are into that and it comes pre installed with six Python libraries.

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So those formulas are available to people. However, they're not for the faint hearted.

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And also, I guess that's not technically Excel functions.

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Yeah, I work in a lot of companies and they had Excel and they use

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FOLB-A or Visual Basic for Applications and yeah, it's feeling like running their will

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yeah, or who will reporting with this. I'll do is, I think Google Apps script compared to this.

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So VBA is an old programming language. And I think outside of Microsoft Office, it's pretty much

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deemed to be obsolete. I think that it only exists because there hasn't yet been replaced. It's also

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got some disadvantages within the Excel infrastructure being that it really only works well on Excel desktop

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for Windows. It doesn't work well on Excel for Mac. It works to a limited degree on Excel for Mac.

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It doesn't look at all in Excel or Excel mobile. So Excel is actually in the process of,

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I think replacing it, they haven't formally said this, but they've launched something called

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Office Scripts, which does work equally well in Excel, line and Mac. And that is using scripting as well.

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However, at the moment it's not quite there. There's a lot of things they cannot do.

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Google Apps Scripts is more capable, I think, at the moment than Excel's VBA.

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And it is more universally used. It's a type of programming that people are a lot more familiar with.

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If you've learned two programming skills in the last like 10, 20 years or so, yeah.

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So that's kind of what I would say.

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Yeah, I think what also happened accurately is the last years, a lot of companies

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begin reporting their, bring the Excel into Power Power BI and Data Warehouses. Is there

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anything else I think about, I don't know if it's work. I think Google has Lockhart Studio or

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something, if they also until like our, our BI. So yeah, so Google's got Data Studio, it was

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called Looker Studio, they renamed it now. And that is kind of that competitor, Power BI. I don't

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think it comes particularly close. I've used Power BI quite extensively. I haven't used

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that one as extensively, Data Studio, but it is more limited, definitely. And one of the things

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that Power BI includes is Power Query, which is a component that also exists within Excel. And that is

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for a data cleanup, a really, really good way to automate data cleanup. And that is one of the key

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reasons why I think Excel does kind of be that Google seats for now. But yeah, but then Google has

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its benefits as well. Yeah, I think also about the future. And especially, I'm more of the Power BI

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dude. So why did companies, when you can do all with Excel, why did they change to Power BI and

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bring it into the, yeah, to fabric or their data and some other data warehouse solutions?

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Yeah, good question. So this also comes with a bit of a history lesson. Initially, that wasn't the

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plan from what I can gather. I've never actually directly spoken to someone, I'm Microsoft about this,

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but what happened was in 2010, Excel released Power Pivot, which allowed you to

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create pivot tables based on multiple sports cables and write your own custom code, code using

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DAX, like, and this was essentially kind of trying to make Excel into a relational database.

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The issue is that they made the licensing, confusing, and it didn't really pick up.

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And it was pretty complicated to use. So then after that, they released Power Query inside Excel,

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those are on 2015. And that was kind of the next part of the puzzle. But you, at that point, you had

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tablo, micro strategy and some other application that the real business intelligence people were

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going for, and they could not be one over by Excel. Those guys hate Excel. Those guys, ones who have

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been saying Excel is dead since 1995. And they, they, whenever the co-worker outside of the IT

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department says that they use Excel, they cringe a little bit and they get angry because Excel does

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not have the same kind of validation. You can't have a proper relational database with it. And so,

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even though Excel did actually create relational database structure through Power Pivot and Power Query,

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they wouldn't even, they wouldn't even look at it. Then Power BI can't. And then Power BI, when it

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first got launched, was Power Query plus Power Pivot minus XL plus Power View. Power View is

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something else that got released in Excel 2016 and kind of failed. So it was essentially, for the most

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part, three or four things that existed already within Excel and then a couple of other small things.

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And I'll tell you when I first tried Power BI, it was within its first few months of release.

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And I had beta over time and I was like, oh, I want to see how I want to create a column chart month by

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month. And I look at the column charts and it goes April, then August, then December, then February,

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then I'm like, oh, well, this isn't what I want. How do I change this? The answer you can't.

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Power BI wasn't able to sort by month. And that was such a stupid thing for a long, long time.

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But then eventually they sorted it within the first year of its release. And then they sorted some other

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things and then some other things and some other things. But Power BI has been around for, I think,

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11 or 12 years now. But there's still, there's still some things where you're like, how do I make

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this line chart do this thing? That seems pretty obvious. And the answer is you can't because they

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keep releasing new features every month, which is great. And there were definitely times in my life

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where I would, I would kind of wake up in the middle of the night and see, oh, have they released a new

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monthly update? Yeah. I've got so excited about it. And that was great. But on the other hand,

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it just kind of points out that there still remain to this day to be holes inside of what Power BI can do.

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But yeah, anyway, I'm side-traffing going to answering a question. I think it was,

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Microsoft needed to release Power BI because they could, they would never have been able to win

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over the tablo, the micro strategy and the other business intelligence experts to look outside of

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Excel. And so they needed to really, this, this other thing. The reason why Power BI became so popular

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is because all the people who were Excel people now, now suddenly became also date business intelligence

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people. And more so, everyone's already in the Microsoft infrastructure. So it's very easy for

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Microsoft to kind of take that market share away from people because people are already paying for

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the, there are other features. Yeah, I think at the start, I don't know, if I just start a co-pilot,

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in Excel, it feels a little bit like, yeah, Glippies back. And also on Power BI, there was all the time

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serious things are really, really bad. And you have to learn DAX or, yeah, most times, the

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model, yeah, SQL. I think, yeah, it was, it was really, really bad time. But is there anything you say,

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"Whoa, did this make it?" That's why when you use Excel, you should also start with Power BI.

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Okay. I think, I think in terms of use cases of a software, Excel has 100 fold in the use cases of

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Power BI. Power BI is really only for people that want a very, very sophisticated robust, automated

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analytics thing. Whereas Excel, you'll use that to keep a shopping list or to

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have various other things that are, that are simply done. And again, people still will export to

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Excel from their accounting software, their ERP software, CRM and, and all the things like that.

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Because in Excel, you know, you can do, you can select cells, you can delete what's in them, you can

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insert rows and columns. All that stuff is too crazy to use because it wasn't built to be robust.

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That is also why the, why the, the IT departments often, often don't like Excel and claim that Excel is

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dead or should be dead. They want Excel to be dead. But in their mind, everyone else needs to be a

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database expert for that to work. So it doesn't, it doesn't really hang true in a lot of the cases.

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Yeah. I think one argument I hear often is say that,

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yeah, that that's a lot of companies will have these, yeah, they have, I don't know what's the fear of

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losing the data or the knowledge. And then they have it in a, yeah, in a database. So what did you

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think here? Is it, yeah, it's right or? Databases have more robust ways to prevent people

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deleting data they have, they have ways of tracking who's done what Excel and Google sheets, they both

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released that feature recently. So now you can go cell by cell and see who's edited

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and what the history of that cell is. But yeah, I mean, there is the risk of that. You could have people

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deleting things. It's, it's now less risky because saving any file in the cloud means you can,

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you have document recovery, you have document history, you can go back through an earlier version

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and get it. So in, in that sense, it's, it is less risky than it used to be, but it's still,

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it's still not quite as robust. Same reason why even though I'm an accountant, I would never advise

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people to keep an accounting system in their spreadsheet because the accounting software is going

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to do a better and it does have an audit log of who's done what changes. And it does prevent people

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from doing things that will break the software, whereas Excel, someone could delete a couple of key

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formulas and it will just break. Excel is not very good at telling you when you are, when you are

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excluding some numbers that you want inserted into a some formula, things like that.

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If you, yeah, I created what is similar to a database on Excel for a client this week.

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And it's, it's not the kind of thing like, you know, if you have a new project, you add that to the

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project list and then that, that addition will flow through to every other possible place where it

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could go so that people could then add it to every other place. It's, it's not quite that simple,

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as it would be in a database, yeah. Yeah. Awesome. A little bit about the, the, the fun part,

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have you, what was the funniest stretcher mistake you had I have seen?

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The funniest spreadsheet mistake I've ever seen.

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This is really a funny spreadsheet mistake. It's just a bit of a nuance. So,

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Excel's date system is pretty interesting. So, it stores dates as numbers,

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as do many databases so that you can use the calculations. You could say, how many days is it

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from today until my birthday? How many days has this invoice been over? You.

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And then if you go back in time, so right now the number is about 46,000 and something. And

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the reason why that is is because the date number one is the first of January 1900.

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But the thing is if you go, if you go date number zero, that will actually tell you if you type in zero

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and transform that to date, Excel will mark that as the zero of January 1900. And any date before

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that Excel is not able to compute at all. So, nothing before 1900. But what I guess even funnier is

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that Excel actually marks the first of January 1900 as a Sunday, but it's not. It was actually a Monday.

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Now, why did this go wrong? Excel has inherited this issue from Lotus 123, which was the other

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spreadsheet that came before it. And the issue was that Lotus 123 and now Excel still claims that

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the 29th of February 1900 existed because 1900 was a leap year. However, that is just not true.

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Every 1900s did not have a leap year because it was one every hundred years as no leap year ish.

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And Excel invented the states, which means the day of the week of every date between January and

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February 1900 is incorrect because of that bug. They've never fixed it. Google Sheets gets it right,

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but Excel doesn't still. What audience can really love at Excel jokes?

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So, yeah, I think it's, yeah, some of it is just the mundane stuff of doing silly things in the

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workplace. Some of it is just that joke of the Excel guy at the office, the Excel person at the

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office who's the go to person whenever you need to, whenever you need to launch some things and

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you have your frustrations. I do a lot of wordplay as well. I enjoy some wordplay. For example,

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I can tell you one where I talk about how I went to an Excel conference and I learned all about

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the history of spreadsheets. And the history of spreadsheets is interesting because originally when

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it got launched, it was just horizontal rows. And then someone came up with the idea of vertical

383
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separators, these vertical separators, they did not know what name to give them. They didn't know

384
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what column. So that ended up leading to a dark time. The historians today refer to as the

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colonization of Excel. So I've got some, I've got a mix of everything. And in my show, I also talk about

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kind of a, it's also gotten homage to Alan Turing, who's kind of the father of modern computing and AI,

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the first person to iPossus by AI as well. And of course, solving the enigma code that ended up

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cutting the wall short by two years, according to many historians. And we just say there's any,

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any audience you better don't make extra jokes. Yeah, I think if you're, if you're someone here

390
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as an Acoper job, if you're a techie, even if it's something you, you hate that you have to do

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a work, you can all still laugh about it. Or if you're a mathematician or a scientist or an engineer

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and accountant finance professional, I think all of these people do end up using Excel. Even the

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cells and marketing people and the HR people. And so if you, if you enjoy laughing about something that

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makes up quite a bit of your life and you never really talk about it or think about it too much,

395
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then yeah, it could be, it could be something you enjoy. And what drug can be a good good, I say,

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door opener for, for, for, when you talk to, yeah, Excel, Excel people ought to teach them the chain them.

397
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So, very good. So I would just say like, I, I find myself that, you know, I've been given the

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Microsoft MVP Awards and that's really cool. But it means that I get a say in what happens to the

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next steps of Excel and I finally feel like I'm a part of the future of spreadsheets. I finally feel

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like I'm a piece of sheet. And then us, up the, us Excel MVP, we're going to invite it to a conference

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once a year at a special place in Seattle. It is, it's a very petite yet cozy venue. It's a

402
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Microsoft office. I want people don't think that the Excel conference sounds cool. Well, it's cooler

403
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than going to the inside conference. Well, it comes to think of it. A clientele is probably not that

404
00:47:49,300 --> 00:47:57,860
different, which might explain some of my recent targeted ads. There you go. Yeah, okay. And

405
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what, what, when we think about, yeah, or what is one of the spreadsheet habit, everyone

406
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should adopt tomorrow from your perspective? Use tables. People don't know this feature exists,

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just in the insert tab, insert and table, as I said earlier, no, we would ever look up how to make a

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table in a, in a spreadsheet. And if you don't know that, then you're missing out one of the most

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important tools a spreadsheet can offer because it automates formatting and it automates

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formula writing and dragging down formulas and it makes everything all to expand anything that's

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linked from a pivot table to other formulas to validation lists and things like that. So yes,

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use tables both in Excel or in Google Sheets. I even think Google Sheets does them better.

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It's got simpler formulas and it's got this group by feature and simpler naming of the tables as well.

414
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And, and about the future, will you think in, in, in,

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spatula, will exist still in 10 years? Yes, spreadsheets will absolutely exist in 10 years.

416
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People are going to say Excel is dead in 10 years just as much as I'm saying it now.

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I think that people in office jobs will forever want to have a user interface where they can

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very quickly type numbers and make manual adjustments very easily and create, create processes and

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systems. That will evolve because I think AI is becoming a bigger part of it all. And I think

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that some people are switching certain spreadsheets for AI, but they're also developing AI within

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spreadsheets is going to be much, much better and give, and give spreadsheets more use cases.

422
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Like I think on mass data research is something that's going to be used more and more for spreadsheets.

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Need to look up like 100 companies really, really fast. That is, that is becoming

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way easier to do in Excel using AI than any other tool.

425
00:49:59,860 --> 00:50:08,820
Awesome. So, um, yeah, I have every time a, a rapid fire round. So I give a short question. You say

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first what, what comes in your mind. So, okay. One feature Microsoft should steal from Google.

427
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The multi-slag drop down lists. And what should Google steal from Microsoft?

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How query?

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Power, um, that mode or light mode?

430
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Dark mode. Excel or Google tweets? Excel.

431
00:50:42,260 --> 00:50:50,900
Nack or Windows? Windows. Keyboard or mouse? Keyboard.

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Excel look up or, um, index match. Excel look up definitely.

433
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Beable tables or PowerCrary? Oh, say pivot tables, but also group by functions.

434
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Fable AI or Office Spitz?

435
00:51:13,540 --> 00:51:16,740
BBA.

436
00:51:16,740 --> 00:51:20,260
Copilot or Gemini?

437
00:51:20,260 --> 00:51:26,740
Gemini.

438
00:51:27,860 --> 00:51:34,580
Uh, thank you for, for, this was a really fast, uh, quick fire round. So, yeah, um,

439
00:51:34,580 --> 00:51:43,700
thank you for staying here with me. My last question is, um, yeah, where can people find all your,

440
00:51:43,700 --> 00:51:49,540
your stuff online or connect with you? Uh, I will also put your, uh,

441
00:51:49,540 --> 00:51:54,820
then, yeah, your, your info is in the show notes, but what, what, where can the people find you

442
00:51:54,820 --> 00:52:00,660
or connect with you? No, on LinkedIn, my name is David Benayam, same as YouTube.

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00:52:00,660 --> 00:52:08,820
LinkedIn, I have about 12,000s. I post very regularly about updates to spreadsheets and other features

444
00:52:08,820 --> 00:52:15,860
and new videos and new blogs. On Instagram, I'm the Excel comedian, the underscore Excel and

445
00:52:15,860 --> 00:52:22,500
score comedian, and I'm the only person in the world making stand up into about Excel. And then,

446
00:52:22,500 --> 00:52:28,260
yeah, those are the, the three places, yeah. Yeah. Then, uh, yeah, thank you so much. This was a really

447
00:52:28,260 --> 00:52:36,100
interesting insight, especially I never, you, uh, I, I don't use this tool so heavily, especially

448
00:52:36,100 --> 00:52:42,340
Google cheese. Uh, so yeah, thank you for, for giving us a quick overview of all the topics.

449
00:52:42,340 --> 00:52:45,780
Now worries, thank you for inviting me. It's been fun.

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