Google Books Advantages: Why It's Time for Finance Professionals to Switch to Excel

Since its launch in 1985, Microsoft Excel has become the spreadsheet of choice for financial professionals, and there's no doubt that it remains a powerful tool. There are many reasons why it has remained popular for decades. But the rise of cloud computing and the growth of data collected by businesses, especially since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, has changed the way we work, perhaps forever.

Today's cloud-based environment is where the real power of Google Sheets lies. But as many of us learned in the pre-cloud era, many finance and business professionals still use Excel spreadsheets, even those who have moved to Microsoft's cloud-based Microsoft 365.

Company marketing activities in 2016 The business whose financial statements I audited took a significant step by moving all 11,000 employees to Google's G Suite (now Google Workspace), joining more and more growing companies. Moving from G Suite to Google Workspace. Very good. Since then, I've used Google Sheets almost every day and have become a self-taught expert on business and new ways of working. I use Google Sheets to create discount models for large products, manage collaborative projects, do financial planning and analysis, and I often use Google Sheets to modify whitepapers when I need to.

In this article, I will share some of the benefits of Google Sheets, focusing on features that increase my productivity. I also introduced Google Apps Script, a powerful tool for working on workflows and extending the functionality of Google Sheets.

But I will not give Excel etc. Google Sheets; The business is changing so quickly that such analysis will become obsolete within two weeks. Instead, I focus on the benefits of Google Sheets and new ways of working as a result of online productivity tools. I also talked about some of the downsides of moving away from Microsoft.

The Advantages of Google Sheets

The biggest advantage of Google Sheets over Excel is its integration ability, the ability to manage very large tasks and data by integrating with BigQuery, and the real-time automation provided by Google Apps Script. While Excel and other tools still have these features, Google has made them so intuitive and easy for end users to use that even the most professional financial planner can quickly get up to speed and start seeing good results.

Easier collaboration

The best part of using data is the ability to collaborate seamlessly. In the old way of working, you have master data stored in a (at best) shared directory that someone has to "own", join or work with to email back from users.

In contrast, Papers is associated with different types of collaboration, from asynchronous (partners working independently on the same data and often at different times) to synchronous collaborative editing. With asynchronous updates, you can use notifications to alert people to questions or concerns and give them tasks that can be completed once completed.

Smart chips bring fast data to users' fingertips without worry. They must click to leave the file. For example, human chips can identify a specific employee and provide links to contact information, while data and calendar chips can provide details and other information. The smart chip combined with Time View allows users to see time-related information, making Papers not only the best place for financial analysis, but also the center of work and information, including all aspects of a project.

Organising information on the fly with other colleagues is a powerful way to work. Compared to the old way of working, the production of two or three people quickly works well in Google Sheets and creates a financial model or works very well. Multiple cursors of different colors move simultaneously on the screen to create patterns, almost like a time-lapse video of the rendered image.

There is also space to accommodate different participants. For example, not everyone should be able to edit a spreadsheet. View-only and comment-only security management options and data integrity provide insight to those who need it.

Built-in Version Control

If you've ever experienced document crashes that disrupted recovery for hours, you probably have a habit of saving data frequently. This is fine if one person is working alone, but if it's a little wonky, confusion can arise when several versions of the same document start circulating among colleagues and one person forgets to update the name file.

Google Workspace does this thanks to its improvements to tracking, allowing only a single document to exist for the life of the project. Accessed via the View Version History option in the menu, this allows you to view all revisions to your files in real-time. It also includes the name of the person who changed everything. All changes are saved and you can "rewind" to a previous part of the data lifecycle and return to the state when it was first created. Not only that, for mobile you can select "Show edit history" and click back to see what each change was, when it was changed and the change price, how to change it.

This is available to all Google Workspace users. Microsoft users will need SharePoint or OneDrive to access the past version of Excel.

Scale Study

One of the mistakes my colleagues and I make when using Metin is that it is required for small calculations. It's "nothing more or less than a calculator", but it's not useful for large samples or datasets. But it turns out that Google Sheets is just as powerful as the desktop app. As I see below, Google Sheets can handle large financial models and connect to Google BigQuery to analyze big data.

For example, when working on a merger and acquisition project, one of the many documents you need is a financial model that records all relevant financial history and other miscellaneous documents. Set the future as a driving force. If you're active in M&A, you'll likely start with a template that includes everything you need, like financial models, cost calculations, and more. Available information then grows at the project level to include fiscal and tax changes due to allocation of historical financial information, using business/business reasons to support various scenarios for financial forecasting.

Within a few months the file will have twelve tabs with a complex network of links between them. Not only do the tables contain a lot of interactive information, but thanks to their history, the question "Who changed the discount rate?" You will not shout. When your product metrics drop! The calculation engine allows you to analyze big data directly in Text. BigQuery can process all of an organization's data and make it available for analysis, whether by experts such as finance professionals or data research teams performing the machine learning process.

Encourage collaboration to win

For many finance and marketing professionals, the report is one of the most important, if not the most important, report. They are our canvas, our notebook, and our tools. We spend thousands of hours using them throughout our careers. We want the experience to be fun and productive.

I've found that collaboration and other innovations that come with web-based productivity apps like Google Sheets deliver the best results when compared to traditional apps. Cloud-based Microsoft 365 has become more powerful in recent years, but collaboration still falls short of today's needs. > Due to changes like remote collaboration and the need to analyze larger data, finding the right talent for you has become important, and business insights to measure Google Sheets have become more powerful.

This article has recently been fully updated to include the most accurate and up-to-date information. The following statements can confirm these changes.