However, in Excel Online you can also select horizontal data bars and icons for marking. Unfortunately, you can't customize your own color combinations when working with gradients. When creating such gradients, you have several color templates to choose from. In other words, imagine if you look at dozens or hundreds of data points, and rather than constantly comparing the numeric values, you can glance at what shade of blue, red or purple each value is, helping you to more accurately estimate and compare. You can also display gradients which can help you show, at a glance, how positive or negative a value is compared to others. In Excel Online, you can format table fields based on their content and, using predefined rules, you can automatically mark red cells that have, for example, a value less than 10.
These twelve areas are especially relevant for more advanced users those who have extensive experience working with spreadsheet software. In the spirit of limiting the scope of this article to something more reasonable, I've chosen to focus on reviewing twelve functions where I could really see differences between the two pieces of software. It would be far too tedious to list every function and to search for small differences. In many ways Excel Online and Google Sheets are quite similar, especially functionally. I'll be exclusively comparing Excel Online to Google Sheets and not the version of Excel that is installed locally. By contrast, G Suite office apps are developed for the cloud from the outset and thus they don't have locally installed versions at all, no matter the plan. Furthermore, depending on the version of Office 365 that you're using, you are either limited to only the online versions of these tools or, if you have a more robust plan, you can use the online versions of the tools along with their locally installable counterparts. Microsoft only took the plunge into the cloud with online versions a few years ago, which is rather recent considering industry trends. Microsoft Office is best known for its locally installed applications such as Excel, Word, and PowerPoint, to only name a few.
Both are also part of larger collections of business software organized into office suites: Excel Online is a Microsoft Office 365 module and Google Sheets is a G Suite application.
The vast majority of organizations use some sort of browser-based spreadsheet app, and Microsoft Excel Online and Google Sheets are industry leaders in this area of professional software.