[Closed] Anyone switched from Office356 to Google (workspace?)

For my sins I have to use both and do a lot of transferring between the two.
I much prefer the google suite - it really does just work.
Office 365 apps feel as though they have a few more features, but not any that I miss in gsuite.

The only thing I really can't get on with in G Suite is handling me emails in a browser. The UI drives me absolutely crazy. So much so that I use outlook as my gmail client 😀

Otherwise, its all good 🙂

Takes some getting used to, my company switched about 2 years ago (10k employees), and I have learnt to live with it. Document formats are not so much of an issue now, as Google tries hard to play well with others. Collaboration is such a key part of what we do, and G-suit does that really well. As you mentioned, its 99% mindset. I don't think I would go back.

We have O365 but the web based version of Word etc are pretty crap - they can't handle / display anything other than the most simple document layouts. I just use the downloaded Office 16 (or whatever the # is) you get with 365.

like oldtennisshoes I use both for different things. I'd have no hesitation at just using Google. If OTHER people send you stuff that's where it might screw up the formatting or very fancy excel functions but stuff you make is generally fine and will open fine in word too.

We don’t really use any advanced/collaboration features of our office subscription apart from email, word, excel etc.

You'll probably have a bit of a struggle to convince users that this change is actually for the better then. If I was switching an organisation I'd seriously consider how you'll train them to get maximum value / utility from it. Collaboration stuff is lovely in google, workable in office.

I had always been a MS Office user, then one of the clients I worked with insisted that all work needed to be on the Google suite.

It took me about a week to get used to it, but once familiarised, it works so, so well.

The collaborative element is fantastic. Being able to @ people, anywhere in any document, comment or feature for their review, comment or decision removes so much email traffic.

The only thing that I found frustrating was that by the end of the day I would have about 50 tabs open with various inboxes, spreadsheets, folders and other documents and could never find the tab I needed. So would just open a fresh one, creating even more tabs.

I'm no longer working on that account, and back on a mix of Windows 7/Ofice 2013, and Windows10/365, and really miss the Google functionality.

I use both because I was told to ... no biggie.

Personally, I prefer Office because I am so used to them therefore no problem.

Google suite is fine too but I just need to learn a bit more.

You are right about mindset. My last job was for a cloud software company and we used Google. I took the view that since we were a cloud software business, I should embrace the ways of the cloud, but I was really surprised at the amount of colleagues who claimed some exceptional need and got Office installed on their laptops.

As for functionality, I thought the Google stuff was fine and, as has been said above, it made collaboration really easy, at least with those whose mindset supported collaboration!

The collaborative element is fantastic. Being able to @ people, anywhere in any document, comment or feature for their review, comment or decision removes so much email traffic.

I thought you can do that in 365? Not that I do much collaborative stuff...

but I was really surprised at the amount of colleagues who claimed some exceptional need and got Office installed on their laptops.

Macros and VBA - which don't exist in the their cloud versions.

I sold it to the Board and moved my 500 user company to Google G-Suite as it was then. Never looked back. I am going to leave soon and dreading a MS Teams world 🙁

Macros and VBA – which don’t exist in the their cloud versions.

If that was the reason I would be less surprised/disappointed. But we are talking about people who wouldn't know what VBA was if it bit them on the arse.

I used a business to help with the project and run the training, who were excellent. Training made the difference.

Mail I always hated Gmail, but now post the training and two plus years my mail is so under control, that I could never do in Outlook. I sit next to my wife, who works for a massive corp and we compare how we work and Google is so much more efficient. I think the way the Doc's work collaboratively, must improve productivity so much.

I have also taken 80% to Chromebooks and I have had one for over two years. My life personal work life is so much easier. My Service Desk team workload has dropped to almost nothing.

I saved the company £1M over a couple years with the move and gave them a working toolset, so the sell was quite easy tbh.

As there appear to be some IT types here who have actually done some due diligence, what’s the scoop with Google’s prying eyes on all your inter office gossip important stuff?

Macros and VBA – which don’t exist in the their cloud versions.

And dynamic arrays and the encodeurl function.  It's almost impossible to explain to a 'normal' user that some worksheets can be opened in a browser but others will break if you do it, so even accidentally opening it will stop it working for everyone else.  Complete insanity

From my experience as a user, a key consideration is how much interaction with other organisations will you have.
I do a lot of work with corporates who all use Office, so using G-suite would be a problem in terms of document sharing across organisations and systems (unless googledocs have changed a lot).
Also when travelling (i kind-of remember wahat that's like) it's useful to have email running offline in outlook on the laptop so can use that when on a plane/train. Not sure how easy that is with Gmail

A client has tried to use googlemeet instead of teams, and the quality of sound is so poor we use my company teams instead.

THere are an increasing number of teams and office add-ins that you can use to add value to presentations and Teams interactions that make this a good way to work collaboratively.

We've ran G-suite for several years but are just about to make the switch to 365.  The main reason is compatibility with other organisations (all on 365) and using Teams, which seems to work so much better than Google Meet.  We also do a lot of work in Office, preparing reports and working in excel etc, etc and the Google version - docs and sheets - we feel isn't anywhere near as good.  I'm hoping we're not going to be making a big mistake!

THanks everyone a lot of great feedback.

Seems like i will go for it.

Anyone had any issues migrating existing mailboxes? Seems there is a tool for that.

Think we will stick with zoom for meetings.

Pay for both + Zoom & Slack. Know many more that do the same.

Google meets and teams video suck Vs Zoom if you rely on it to make sales / have a lot of external client comms / screen sharing from external devices.

Excel is a must for anyone doing anything vaguely complex. Google sheets prob cut it for 75% of users out there. As mentioned, VBA / Macros / Pivot tables / loads of data without using a mouse for those with muscle memory.

Can export most Google docs to their MS equivalents. May not look perfect but again if you are not relying on it for sales and marketing they are probably fine for 80% of people out there.

Slack much better than teams, especially if you are using integrations or chatting over multiple co’s.

Gmail vs Outlook - not as much in it these days.

Security: You probably have much more to worry about internally than Google or MS running off with your cross country / Enduro race strategy setup 😂