People ask which is better as if one must win. In practice most teams use both: Sheets for anything many people edit at once, Excel for heavy analysis and anything built on years of macros. Here is where each one really pulls ahead.

Where Google Sheets wins

• Real-time collaboration. Ten people in one sheet, each seeing the others’ cursors, with no “file locked for editing” messages. Excel’s co-authoring has improved a lot, but Sheets was built for this from day one.
• Sharing and forms. Google Forms drops answers straight into a sheet. For a quick survey, leave tracker or event sign-up, nothing is faster.
• Version history is automatic and easy to browse. You can name versions before big changes.
• Web functions: IMPORTRANGE pulls from another sheet, IMPORTHTML and IMPORTXML pull tables from web pages, GOOGLEFINANCE fetches share prices.
• Cost: free with a Google account.

Where Excel wins

• Size and speed. Sheets allows up to 10 million cells per spreadsheet; Excel allows about a million rows per sheet and, with Power Pivot, models with many millions of rows. Large Sheets files get sluggish long before the limit.
• Power Query and Power Pivot. Nothing in Sheets matches repeatable data cleaning and a proper data model with relationships and DAX.
• Pivot tables and charts have more options: calculated fields, grouping, slicers connected to several pivots.
• VBA can control the whole desktop — other files, Outlook, PDFs. Apps Script in Sheets is powerful but lives in Google’s world.
• Offline and privacy: a file on your drive, no browser needed.

Formulas that behave differently

Moving files between them

• Opening an .xlsx in Sheets converts formulas; most work. Macros are ignored and charts may look different.
• Downloading Sheets as .xlsx turns QUERY, IMPORTRANGE and GOOGLEFINANCE into static values or errors.
• Dates can shift if the file’s locale differs (DD/MM vs MM/DD). Check the locale under File › Settings in Sheets before importing.

A sensible split

Collect and collaborate in Sheets; analyse and report in Excel. For example, a sales team logs visits in a shared Sheet, and once a week Power Query in Excel pulls it (published as CSV) into the monthly dashboard. See Power Query basics for that last step.