Archive article - published on April 02 2020
Choosing an office suite that best suits your business can be challenging. Before making a concrete decision, you like to weigh out your options, list the pros and cons, and most importantly, see which one won’t cost an arm and a leg. The most commonly used office suites today are Google’s G Suite and Microsoft’s Office 365. As expected, there are a few similarities, but also a few differences as well!
We are proud to be a Google shop, as well as a Strategic Google Cloud Partner. G Suite provides all of the tools necessary to ensure our operations run effectively and efficiently. Office 365 and G Suite both provide their users with word processing, spreadsheets, email, presentation, calendar, note-taking and video conferencing.
Let’s take a further look at the two suites and compare their tools!
- Word Processing: G Suite makes collaboration easy with Google Docs. Google Docs allows you to collaborate with multiple people within the same document, at the same time. How cool is that?! Office 365 doesn’t provide the same collaboration tools, but Word offers other useful tools depending on what your business is looking for.
- Spreadsheets: Google Sheets provides collaboration and automatically saves your work as you go. Although it may be easier to create charts and graphs in Excel than in Google Sheets, Excel still doesn’t allow collaboration within a sheet and you have to manually save your work.
- Email: Gmail has huge storage space, security of data, online access anywhere, and most of all, it’s cheaper and easier to maintain than Office 365. G Suite also allows you to create up to 30 email aliases per account, whereas Outlook will only allow you to create up to 10 new aliases per year.
- Presentations: When it comes to presentations, Google Slides and PowerPoint are quite different. Google Slides provides an easier way to create slides as it isn’t overloaded with unnecessary or “nice to have” features. Can you guess what else Google Slides provides? Yep, that’s right, collaboration! You and your team can successfully work together within the same slide deck suggesting, commenting, and editing. PowerPoint can be overwhelming for those not familiar with spreadsheets, especially with some of the advanced features. This can become challenging for people that just want to get the job done in a timely manner.
- Video Conferencing: Google Hangouts is an easy and affordable way to have video meetings. Hangouts can host up to 100 people per call and allows screen sharing as well as collaboration. You can either join the Hangout meet link, or call through your mobile device if you’re on the go (you can also join a video hangout from your phone via the app!). Microsoft's Teams is similar to Hangouts, but it doesn’t allow collaboration of documents during the meet nor does it allow audio calls, making it harder for those that are always on the go.
- Shared Calendar: With G Suite, you can easily share your calendar with other team members. G suite allows you to share calendars with the public, making your events visible when individuals search for them. Outlook allows for shared calendars, but doesn't have the feature of making their calendar publicly available.
After looking over the comparisons and differences between the two, I hope you find G Suite is the best fit for your business. G Suite is well known for its collaboration which is extremely important in today’s world.
If you would like to learn more about G Suite pricing and any additional information, please reach out to us.
We look forward to helping your company make the move to G Suite!
Let’s just have a chat and see where this goes.
