Speaker 1: Today is the battle of the behemoths, Google Docs versus Microsoft Office. Let's get into it. Hey guys, how's it going? My name is Adrian Reddix, and today we're talking about Microsoft Office versus Google Docs. The criteria I'm using to judge these two software suites are gonna be design, app choice, features, cost, and support. The first is design. Microsoft Office is the standard. They had the classic blue when you're talking about Word documents. Also, they have this, the most controversial thing since I've started doing these videos is the ribbon. The ribbon, you either love it or you hate it. There's really not a lot of in-between. I'm one of those in-between people. I can have it or I cannot have it. But the ribbon has made an impact on a lot of other Office suites that are out there. The design of Microsoft Office isn't offensive in its own little minimalist way. It's not clunky. It's not a big jumbled mess. Everything flows smoothly, and it's not something that, it messes up a workflow. Everything is there. You don't have to keep going to these different dropdowns or go out of the app to do some stuff. It's pretty good. Now, we're talking about Google Docs. Google Docs is a very minimalist approach. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles of the Microsoft Office product, but it does have all your essentials. You'll also notice that the word processor on Google Docs is also a bluish color. You also know that the spreadsheets is a green. When it comes to the PowerPoint, the slides, they kind of jump the trend on that one, right? Again, just like Microsoft Office, things are very streamlined, and they're very easy to use and easy to find, right? And that's what you need when you're talking about an Office suite. The easier you can have somebody do something, their work or some type of project, the better the experience is. Both suites do a great job of having a user be comfortable in their environment, in their workflow, but I'm always a little partial to the standards. So that's why I'm giving the point to Microsoft Office. The next one is App Choice. And when we're talking about App Choice, Microsoft Office has two different flavors. You have the Home Edition, and you also have the Business Edition. So let's go through the list of your Home and the Office choices that you can get, all right? So you got Word, of course, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, and this thing they call Editor. Editor is really just spell check. I don't know why it's something separate, but it's a thing that's supposed to be better than spell check. I don't know if it really is. I hadn't really seen a huge difference, but it's there as a App Choice or a feature, right? Now, when we're talking about Business, we got a couple more apps that are kind of business-focused, right? We have Access, which is like a database, Publisher, which is a publisher, Intune, which you use Intune for like, the way we use it is for device management. Like if you have a bunch of phones and computers you want to keep track of, use Intune to keep track of them. And you have Azure, the cloud service, right? Google Docs has an equivalent. When we're talking about Google Docs and Office, we have to be a little more liberal when it comes to Office Suite. They have the equivalent of almost everything that Microsoft Office has. So let's go ahead and list those. You have the Docs. You have Sheets, Slides, Gmail, Meet, which is their version of Teams, G-Drive, which is a version of OneDrive. They don't have an editor equivalent, but it's spell check, so I mean, they have a spell check. We'll count that one. The next one is Forms, which is kind of similar to Access. It's not quite the equivalent, so that's one that they don't have. I couldn't really find a publisher equivalent either, but you can do a lot of these things in Publisher that you can do in your documents. It takes a little more manipulation. Publisher makes things a lot easier, but you can use a Word document like Docs to do similar things as Publisher. Not quite, but similar. Then you have the Endpoint Manager, which works exactly like Intune. You also have Google Cloud, which is their equivalent to Azure. But what you have with Google is a couple of other things that can complement their Office Suite or what I'm deeming as their Office Suite, the equivalent of. You also have Scholar. Scholar is very good when you have research papers or you need to look up different peer-reviewed articles. It's very good for that, especially in college. They also have the Arts & Culture. I like this. Arts & Culture did, for me, what PBS used to do way back when. It takes you to places that you probably would never go, see different arts and different things that you don't have access to. To me, it's the ultimate learning tool. It's a real learning experience. So if you wanna get more involved in world art and different cultures you hadn't been experiencing, Arts & Culture is the thing. Classroom for classrooms. It really makes classrooms a lot easier to manage. And my favorite thing is Jamboard. It's kind of like a whiteboard. You can either buy the physical board, which is $4,000, I'm not doing that, or you can use the one that's online, that's free. And you can collaborate with other people and draw your ideas and all the other things you would do on a whiteboard. And for that, I gotta give app choice to Google. The next part is features. And one of my favorite features of Microsoft Office is the templates. They have a lot of built-in templates and they also have an online repository of so many templates from anything, from business flyers to resumes, to cards, to business cards. They have so many templates because over the years they've had so many contributors to make these templates. Love that. I also like the add-ins and what add-ins do for Microsoft Office is it takes all the function of Microsoft Office and add things to them that you would need that they don't offer. Let's say if you wanted to have QuickBooks right at your disposal, you can add the add-in for QuickBooks and you can do whatever you need to do. Whatever function you need, if Microsoft Office doesn't offer it natively or in their app, you can always go to a developer in the store and download that app and put it in there. When you have Microsoft Office, especially the 365, you can share and collab a lot easier. You can go back and forth, any change they make on their end happens on your end. So the collaboration on Microsoft Office 365 is really good. If you don't have the 365, then collaboration is a little harder. And also a really good feature is they have a stripped down version of Microsoft Office Online. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles of the 365 or the desktop version, but it has all that basic functionality you need on the go. And it doesn't cost anything to do that. But again, you're limited on what you can do on Microsoft Online. Also, they have a mobile app and I really have been impressed with the Office mobile app. My biggest critique of MS Office is always you have to download so many different apps. Well, with the MS Office app, it puts everything right there. Anything you save to your online or your 365 account goes right to your phone. And they also have really cool sign-in feature that I really like. So Google, on the other hand, doesn't have as many built-in templates as MS Office has. They do have enough to get you started. You know, you don't have a plethora of templates, but there's enough there to do whatever you need to do. The beauty of Google Docs or the Google Office Suite is that it's online. They do have a version where you can do an offline editor on Chrome, but the beauty of it is anywhere that you can connect to the internet, you can connect to your Office Suite, right? You don't have it tied down to a piece of hardware. It makes collaboration a lot easier. The same thing as Office 365. You can do stuff online with somebody else and the changes they make come on you. So that's how collaboration works. It's really, really good for that. And also sharing. It makes sharing your documents very, very easy. Again, Google Docs and the other equivalents are not as robust as Microsoft Office. It doesn't have the same features as Microsoft Office. So for that, I gotta give it to Microsoft Office. Let's talk about costs. Microsoft Office has so many different prices. Like, okay, let's take this for example. For one person, for the one year subscription for one person, it's $69.99 a year, right? For two to six people, it's $99.99 per year. If you were a student and you didn't want the online features or anything else, you just wanted the basic Word, Excel, PowerPoint, it's $149.99. If you weren't a student and you just wanted those basic things, it's $249.99. But that's not it. Let's say you wanted the business package, right? So with the business package, you get all the stuff we talked about in the app choice section, right? For the basic, it's gonna be $5 per month per user. The standard is $12.50. That is the bigger package. Then you have the business package, which is $8.25 per month per user. But that's not it. I work for a municipality and we use a website called CDWG or CDW, whichever one. And if you go and look for Microsoft Office, you can see all the array of just SKUs, that they have. It's so many different things. It becomes so complicated to know what you need. If you have this many employees, you get this. Or if you have this many employees and you don't need this thing, but we got five different SKUs for this one thing that you might need. It is so confusing having, it is so confusing sometimes having Microsoft Office. We have a rep because Microsoft Office is king. Hey, this is what we need, blah, blah, blah. And they have all these options. It make it so complicated to get Microsoft Office when you get past just a basic level. If you're a company that has a lot of users and you only need these things, if you don't have somebody who knows how to navigate through the SKUs, it's a nightmare. Now, Google Docs is free. You can use it, make yourself a Google account and you're using. They also have a workspace feature that's $12 per month up to, I think it's up to 20 or 30 some odd people. $12 per user per month. And you get the workspace thing. And basically what workspace does, you get a lot of that Office Suite or the stuff I'm calling Office Suite together. And you get that collaboration aspect to it. And you also get the accountability for the base and everything you have that Google offers being free. I gotta give it to Google. So we got ourselves a tie going into the last thing. And the last thing is support. I don't know if you ever had a problem with any Microsoft Office things, but it does happen time and time, especially when you have the desktop version. Just what it is, software happens. I've never had the opportunity to use the call-in support when it comes to Microsoft Office, but I have been on the forums. And the forums are, if it's not a base level problem, the forums will not do you any good. I've gone plenty of times trying to get a answer and go into the forums and you'll ask a question and they'll come back with some, it's not an automated response, but it's a response that's like, hey, did you check all this basic stuff? Which is, if it's for a basic user who doesn't know a lot of things about IT, it's fine. But for somebody on my level, going in there and asking a question and getting some answer that, hey, I've tried this before, and when you say you tried it, well, you're gonna have to do this, that, and the other. And when it gets to a point where they don't know, they'll, in my experience, they'll stop answering. When the forums don't help, you have to go and you have to dig real deep and look for people who have your specific problem. But that's really on a higher level. If it's something like a low-level thing, the forums are okay. But I've never called in and had chat support for Microsoft Office, so I can't tell you how that is. Google, on the other hand, the biggest thing about Google, right, is because it's online totally, except for the offline editor, that if your computer can connect to the internet and there's nothing wrong with the browser, everything is handled by Google. You don't have any issues that is on your desktop, right? And the one big thing that Google has that Microsoft has never been able to recreate is the number two search engine in the world, and that's YouTube. YouTube is Google's hugest advantage because everything you've ever wanna learn about Google Docs and even Microsoft Office is on YouTube. There's videos about how to make macros. There's videos about if something goes wrong on your Microsoft account or Microsoft whatever, how to fix that. They also have such a huge repository of videos that are so helpful in any support thing you would need or any function that you would need in Google Docs or the Google Office Suite. And for that reason, it's very hard to compete against YouTube. So Google gets the point on that. And with a three to two victory, Google Docs or Google Suite wins. I think for most people, the features that Google Docs or Google Office Suite offers is enough for that. The biggest cons to Google Office is you have to be connected to the internet. And unlike a lot of other people, I know that some places don't have enough internet or internet at all. You have places, I live in Central Mississippi. You have places in Mississippi, these rural places that don't have good internet or don't have internet at all. That's a weakness of Google Docs. People need to do things for work and school and they don't necessarily have the internet to do that. If you could get connected to the internet, Google Docs is a really good option for people who are looking to save a little money and get stuff done. What Office Suite do you use on a day-to-day basis? Is it Microsoft Office? Is it Google Docs? Is it something else that we hadn't talked about today? Let me know in the comments section below. That's it. Thanks for joining me. If you liked this type of video, give me a thumbs up. If you didn't like this type of video, give me a thumbs down. Tell me why you didn't like this type of video. And I'll catch you guys in the next one. Have a good one.