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Ask HN: Why are charts in Google Sheets so unintuitive?

7 points by aerosmile ↗ HN
Google Sheets basically ripped off Microsoft Excel in every way possible, except that the pivot tables, charts, and some other details are surprisingly different (relative how everything else is the same, including function names, etc). I got used to every other "differentiation," but it amazes me just how much trouble I have with plotting even the simplest line charts. Is it just me or did Google really screw up that part?

3 comments

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paulpauper
Google is not known for user-friendly UI. Try changing the language on Gmail for example
dingusthemingus
As someone who never really spent the time to learn Excel or Sheets, ive found when I have to do something more complicated then importing a CSV in either system, Sheets is usually easier to do than Excel. Usually though, before im able to finish work in Sheets, a teamate who is a pro in excel will show me how to do in Excel as more of our business users want excel reports anyway.

I think in 2021 there are still way more power users of Excel, and Excel is more important to more of Microsofts customers so they spend money to make it better. Lets remember, how many more 10s of thousands of devs work on Excel compared to Sheets? I want to say i remember seeing a news story that said microsoft was hiring an additional 25k or 36,000 devs to work on Excel.

I would have to google how to make a pivot table :)

seektable
well, try https://www.seektable.com -- with this tool you can make a pivot table just in a few clicks and you may found it much more useful for ad-hoc reporting than Excel/Sheets. For sensitive data self-hosted version can be used.