Microsoft Office vs Google Workspace

Quite a while ago I was an IT manager at a university. We had thousands of students and we were going to provide them with some software that they could do their homework with, that they could save files up in the cloud with, that they could type out documents with, to be able to create presentations, a whole suite of applications. And there was pretty much two options. We could go down the Microsoft path or we could go down the Google path.

When I initially started researching these two options, I thought they were pretty much the same and we were just comparing apples and apples. But really, when I dug into it, they were very different. I can tell you they're a lot closer now than they were when I started researching this a long time ago.

The Two Suites

First of all, just a reminder that a suite is a bundle of applications, and we're going to be comparing Microsoft's version versus Google's version. The names of their suites have changed over time. Same thing with what is actually bundled in those suites; that has changed over time. And depending on what package you buy, they're going to have different sets of the software.

What I will say is the core of what they offer is essentially the same. That is, Microsoft has Microsoft Word and it's very comparable to Docs. Excel is very comparable to Google Sheets, and PowerPoint is comparable to Slides. So this is presentation software, this right here is spreadsheets, and this is word processor. And then they have a lot of other add-ons to that that make these packages a little different, and so it can actually be quite a bit different just from the package standpoint of what's included in those packages. So that's one thing to consider when you're balancing between these.

Features: Word versus Docs

Let's just as an example use Word versus Docs. All the other applications I find are very similar to this comparison.

When it comes to Microsoft Word, I feel like it's a far superior product when it comes to features. Microsoft Office has been doing this a long time. They still have a client version which gives you tons of features and really your ability to control that document, to really get it exactly the way it is that you want that document. It doesn't translate as well online, but there's still also lots of features online as well. And so we have a full feature set here with Microsoft Office.

That's my biggest complaint about Google: you're very limited on the feature set. It's built more for simplicity. It's built for ease of use. And so it wins on the ease of use because it doesn't have as many options. And for the most part, that's fine. A lot of us using these different documents, we don't need a lot of granularity and a lot of control over that document. We're just creating a document and it doesn't need to be anything fancy. And so that's just fine for the most part. But if you want that extra control, you really have to go down the Microsoft route. It is a superior product from that standpoint.

Online Access and Collaboration

The Microsoft products here were created originally as just clients on your machine, and weren't really in a time where we were collaborating to the same level as we are now. And so it wasn't initially built into it, versus Google Docs has always had that built into it.

Now, that being said, Microsoft has caught up for the most part. My complaints with Microsoft products and how easy it was for collaboration and online access has been pretty poor in the past, but they are getting better and better. I feel like at this point in time they're probably for the most part on par with Google Docs. I wouldn't say they're exactly even, because Google Docs is a little more simplistic to work with at times than Microsoft Office is, making it a little more difficult. So I put these two kind of close to the middle here.

What I Use

So what do I use? I use both. I have subscriptions to both the Microsoft products and Google products. I pay for that subscription and I use it in my business because they each have their strengths and weaknesses. Most of the time I actually use the Google products and do a lot of collaboration and working with the Google products. However, when I really want to dial in my graphics and get them just right on there and really create nicer documents, and I use PowerPoint as another example, I then veer towards Microsoft. So I use both of these really heavily, and still do to this day.

Microsoft 365

Right here I have Microsoft 365, their free version that gives me access to a lot of these applications, but only via online. I can't actually open up the client that's installed on my machine. So there is like Microsoft Word that's installed on your machine, and then there's one up in the cloud. This is the one that gives me access to up in the cloud because it's the free version. If I were to pay for this, then I could install a client. And I do actually have that in my setup on my actual machine. This is just my demo machine.

We can see that along the left-hand side here we have a bunch of different applications that we can access. We can create a new Word document, PowerPoint, Excel. We've got Forms, Quiz, Lists, Designer. So we've got all these different options, these different applications. And we see similar applications over here on the left-hand side: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, which is an email client, and we've got Teams for collaboration. So we've got these different applications that we can use with this.

Google

Here we're in Google Docs. This is the word processor. If I click on blank document, then I would be creating a new word processing document. And so then I could create a resume, or they've got a letter here, project proposal. So there's these different templates that I could create. But if I come over here to the left-hand side and click this, we can see there's Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms.

One thing that we already can kind of see now is this is a much more simplistic interface. You can actually use this a little bit easier. It's a little more streamlined. And so we're starting to see the strengths of Google, versus when we pull up this it's a little more cluttered, I find. And one of the reasons is because this tends to have more features. So that's one of the things that we are going to compare: this has a little more features, but it kind of creates some problems with how they have things laid out, and some of it's not quite as intuitive at times, but you can do more with it, versus Google Docs, which is a little more simplistic and a little bit easier to use.