Google Workspace vs. Microsoft Office 2016 (discontinued)

Since our company is structured around Google Workspace at the moment, it is well suited for our entire workflow. I do have concerns though, for when it comes time for our company to have our own intranet built and how well the data migration will be from Google Workspace to that intranet that gets built.

Incentivized

It is quite suitable for daily work in almost any job. Although now there are more advanced tools, found online in the cloud, it is still a good option for daily work. I highly recommend it as it has always been a reliable tool. The problem would be the support since it is a tool that is discontinued.

Incentivized

• It's terrific to have a suite of products that is built to work together, rather than having to piece tools together.
• The email and calendar are the tools I use most often together. I use Gmail through Apple Mail rather than in the browser, and it works great. Also really easy to access and use my calendar.
• I use the other suite of features both for my own company internally and to share files with clients. Super easy to use and share.

Incentivized

• Consistent functionality across the several Office components. This consistency is a great advantage for adoptions of other unused Office components. For example, if you want to publish a book that you have done with Word, you don't need to relearn new menu positions, new file-related actions, new reviewing procedures, etc.
• Functionality extensions with Add-ins. This has always been a nameplate for Microsoft and Office keeps its tradition. I remember the renowned Bill Gates phrase when Visual Basic has been presented to him, he said: "Make it extensible". So, for example, I use Grammarly to improve my translations and there are thousands of Add-ins that you can purchase to increase your productivity.
• Continuous improvement of online Office 365 allows for comprehensive usage from any platform, like Apple or Android tablets, Mac or Windows, cell phones and more. Every day and regular user's functions are there. And if you need extensive reviewing capabilities or programming, you can always rely on the desktop version.
• Spelling and translate for multiple languages are now included in the online version. I should indeed rely more on the online version.

Incentivized

• A single Google Workspace user should be able to have more than one Google Voice phone number (ideally)
• At times, Google Meet seems a little clumsy (but I think they're about to address that with the new release...It may or may not be better. Who knows? :))
• Some screen layouts are a tad clumsy, but they are sufficiently malleable that once one gets the hang of it, one can customize the environment quite a bit.
• A viable (for small business), relatively-inexpensive, virtual desktop that would include/could include a Windows license or, at least close-to-perfect emulation.
• It would be great if there was accommodation for those who send out a great deal of mail in a given day. Not everyone who does that is a spammer. Although, by Google standards, and relative to some others, Google allows for sending out a good bit of mail, for those who do mass volumes and would prefer not to have their own mail server, it would be good if Google could find a way to accommodate them.

Incentivized

• Office 2016 professional edition can be priced for a single user license, it would be nice to see a drop in the pricing.
• Office 2016 home edition is a better price but does not include outlook 2016, so it is not a good fit for the workplace environments.
• Office 2016 can run slowly on older systems, so you need to make sure you have a machine that is 4 years old or less for it to run smoothly.

Incentivized

There is no better solution for cloud storage and real time collaboration. The amount of features included in G Suite is unmatched and out of other things we’ve tried over the years, nothing comes close to being as great of a tool.

Incentivized

We believe that office 2016 offers the best value when it comes to features included out of the box. The software is used in its entirety by our organization and is easily supported by our staff of IT technicians. Users find this software to be easy to learn and easy to use with minimal learning curve.

Incentivized

On the user end, it's great, probably some of the most user friendly products out there. On the admin side, it can get a little more arcane, but it's still better than a lot of other services. At worst I wrangle some CSVs to perform mass changes, but it's a far cry from the days of Powershell scripts or purely manual entry.

Incentivized

It's fairly easy to use, but the automatic formatting or capturing of formatting when pasting is wonky - especially when there are outlines or other bullets/numbered lists. Fixing and sizing up tables can be annoying, and there are sometimes formatting issues that we just absolutely cannot fix for some reason

Incentivized

I have not had to use much support for G Suite, but I imagine it would be a great service, as is everything else that Google provides. I've searched for questions through the help center, and that was easy to use and easy to find. I'm sure I would have no complaints.

Incentivized

Microsoft support is very good, big corporation has people for everything. You can find a lot of solutions to problems and helpful tutorials, as well as ready to be copied macros and functions made by communities around the world. Very big user base means there aren't situations that someone else didn't have already

Incentivized

nothing to say

We selected Google Workspace for it's ease of use and clean UI. Microsoft Office granted does have a lot of features and may be more advanced in certain areas (Excel vs sheets), however for the range of functions we need, google workspace provided the necessary features for an affordable price. In particular Outlook compared to Gmail is more outdated and clunky, and I have found more issues with Outlook's deliverability in the past than I do with Gmail. Meet is also much more modern and clean, with useful features like record and Gemini that feel much cleaner than Teams. I have also found that inviting external users (ones that don't use the same workspace as you) is much easier through google meet than teams calls. Drive also has a much cleaner UI, and easier to adopt than OneDrive.

Incentivized

We have always used Microsoft Office products, beginning with the older versions, but we did try a brief evaluation of OpenOffice from Apache. Even though that open source software is free, it's got certain limitations and a different functionality that was missing from Office2016, so we decided not to pursue that path.

Incentivized

• Google Workspace costs us a little more, but our inboxes are safer for it.
• Our email deliverability has improved significantly. No more lost or bounced emails with our invoices attached. Workspace helps us get paid!
• Our support requests for undelivered email has disappeared.

• For the user groups that use Office in our organization, they would find it difficult to work without it. Decades of development are hard to just walk away from.
• Office products are considered standard. When sharing data, there is almost never a question of "What format would you like that file in"?
• For the price of convenience at this time, licensing fees are priced where we don't feel that we are not getting what we paid for.

Incentivized