Google Sheets vs Excel, Best Google Sheets Alternatives in MS Excel, Smartsheet, Notion in AI ERA

Opening Excel Online drops you on a home screen organized around "Create with templates," with tabs for Recommended, Lists, Invoices, Project management, Budgets, and Calendars, and a scrollable row of thumbnails — an invoice, a cash flow forecast, a weekly schedule, a project timeline, a monthly calendar. Below that sits My workbooks, listing recent files with Opened date, Owner, and Activity columns, plus Recent, Favorites, and Shared filters. It's a genuinely template-heavy starting point, which suits users who want a polished structure — a Gantt-style project layout, a formatted invoice — without building one from scratch.

Google Sheets takes a different approach to the same job: the Share dialog opens directly over your document, listing "People with access" — here, just the owner — and a "General access" setting showing "Anyone with the link" set to Viewer. A Copy link button sits alongside Done, making it fast to hand a read-only or editable link to someone without leaving the sheet. Where Excel Online organizes around templates first, Sheets puts real-time, link-based collaboration one click away from any open document, which is the core reason teams often default to it for anything more than one person editing.

The Sheets home screen (accessible from sheets.google.com or the Google apps grid) lists every spreadsheet you've touched in a flat, searchable table — name, who it's shared with, and when it was last opened — sortable by owner or by "Last opened by me." Excel Online's My workbooks table does something similar but stays scoped to Excel files specifically, whereas Sheets' list sits inside the broader Google Drive ecosystem, meaning a spreadsheet, a Doc, and a Form a colleague shared with you all surface through the same kind of view. If your team already lives in Gmail and Drive, that shared file model is a real convenience; if you're standardized on Microsoft 365, Excel's workbook list plugs into OneDrive and SharePoint the same way.

Google Workspace's own Sheets FAQ page answers two questions that come up constantly in a Sheets-vs-Excel comparison: anyone with a Google Account can create in Sheets for free, though features like joining a Meet call from a document require a paid Workspace plan; and yes, you can convert other spreadsheet formats into Sheets, which covers importing existing Excel workbooks rather than starting over. A third FAQ on how co-editing works reinforces that real-time collaboration is treated as a headline feature, not an afterthought, in Google's own framing of the product.

Smartsheet borrows the row-and-column look of a spreadsheet but is built around project tracking — Gantt charts, task dependencies, automated approval workflows — rather than general-purpose calculation. Teams that outgrow using a shared spreadsheet as an informal project tracker, with color-coded rows standing in for status updates, are the ones who tend to move to Smartsheet, since it turns that same visual pattern into a structured, purpose-built tool with real automation behind it.

Notion approaches data from the opposite direction: it's a workspace of pages and databases where a table is one view among several — you can flip the same data into a board, a calendar, or a list. That makes it strong for teams who want data sitting alongside notes, documentation, and project context in one place, but it isn't built for heavy formula work or large-scale numeric analysis the way Sheets or Excel are, so most teams end up using it alongside a spreadsheet rather than in place of one.