Google Sheets
Why Google Sheets
Google Sheets is a browser-based spreadsheet for entering, organising, and analysing data with formulas, pivot tables, and charts. It suits lean B2B founders and small teams building manual reports, trackers, and lightweight dashboards without dedicated analytics tooling. Use it when you need quick insights without the overhead of enterprise software.
What it does
Google Sheets is Google's spreadsheet in the browser. It has rows, columns, formulas, pivot tables and charts, and it saves continuously to your Google account. Several people can edit the same file at once and see each other's cursors. You can script it with Apps Script, and it has an official API.
Why you would need it
Every business has numbers that more than one person needs to see and change. A content calendar, a pipeline tracker, a budget, campaign results, a list of leads from an event. If those live in emailed Excel files, you get five versions and no truth.
Sheets fixes that by being one file at one link. You share it, set who can view or edit, and everyone works from the same data. It is the quickest route from "I have some data" to "I can see it".
Where it fits
Sheets is the glue of a small stack. Forms, ad platforms, CRMs and payment tools can export to it, and reports and dashboards are often built on top of it. It sits inside Google Workspace, next to Google Forms, which can write responses straight into a sheet.
It replaces desktop spreadsheets for shared work, and it is often the placeholder for the dashboard or database you have not built yet.
What stands out
- Real-time collaboration with comments, version history and clear sharing controls.
- Apps Script, which turns a sheet into a small automation hub.
- A public API for reading and writing cell values and managing formatting.
- Connected Sheets, which the API can manage, for working with data from external sources.
My take
Sheets is where I would start almost any process, and it is also where I would be honest about when to stop. Once a sheet becomes the system of record for something important, you have usually outgrown it.
The weaknesses are known. It slows down on large files, it is not a database with relations and integrity, and "anyone can edit" means formulas get overwritten and live numbers get pasted over as static values. That is how fragile, undocumented processes grow. Lock the cells that matter, and write down what the sheet does.
Verdict
Pick Sheets when you need a shared place for numbers today and the data volume is modest. Skip it as the long-term home for customer data, financial models or anything that needs real relations. At that point use a database or a proper tool for the job.
Notes
Your note
Before you choose
Size and speed limits
Large sheets get slow. Heavy formulas, big imports and many open collaborators all add up. If a file takes a long time to load, that is a sign to move the data to a database or a data tool, not to add more formulas.
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Governance is on you
Anyone with edit access can overwrite a formula. Use protected ranges, keep an inputs tab separate from calculations, and name an owner for every important sheet. Version history helps, but it does not stop the damage.
Not a database
Sheets has no relations, no enforced data types and no real access control per row. If you find yourself building lookups across five tabs, look at Airtable or a database such as Supabase.
Excel and offline fit
If your finance team builds complex models with macros, Excel will serve them better. Offline use works, but it is basic. Check who relies on what before you move a model across.