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I am trying to establish the difference between Smartsheet and Excel (Office 365 version). What features does Smartsheet provide that online Excel does not ?
One of the Smartsheet Product Managers may have a comparison chart that shows differenes, but here's what I've found to be HUGE pluses to Smartsheet.
1) Collaboration - Smartsheet allows multiple people to work on a sheet at the same time whether in or outside of your network firewall.
https://www.smartsheet.com/product-tour
2) Alerts - We use alerts within a Help desk function to let us know when a sheet has been updated.
https://www.smartsheet.com/product-tour/alerts-and-reminders
3) Web Forms - Think of Survey Monkey built into Excel. I was able to do a survey to over 100 people nationwide and collect their responses. GREAT TOOL!
https://www.smartsheet.com/product-tour/web-forms
4) File Sharing - this was not one of my top features early on, but lately i've used this feature to attach a file and then publish the sheet and allow a user to securely download the file. https://www.smartsheet.com/product-tour/file-sharing
5) Conditional Formatting - This rules based functionality is MUCH easier to use than in Excel. Allows fields to be highlighted easily.
6) Reporting - Being able to run reports across multiple sheets in extremely helpful.
https://www.smartsheet.com/product-tour/reporting
7) Cell Linking - I don't use this that much but another guy does here and it is a great feature. https://www.smartsheet.com/product-tour/cell-linking
Dont forget...
Update requests - send a row or group of rows to anyone to edit and update the data (without logging into Smartsheet)
http://help.smartsheet.com/customer/portal/articles/504779-using-update-requests
Publish sheets - create a URL to a sheet (editable or read only) that anyone can access without logging into Smartsheet.
http://help.smartsheet.com/customer/en/portal/articles/522078-publishing-sheets-reports
Discussions/attachments - add row level (task specific) or sheet level discussions and attachments
http://help.smartsheet.com/customer/en/portal/articles/518408-uploading-attachments
http://help.smartsheet.com/customer/en/portal/articles/504767-using-discussions
SUPPORT - their support team is top notch. Quick and helpful, over email or the phone.
support@smartsheet.com
Excellent. Thanks for the feedback. I am curious as to how versioning works if multiple people can access a sheet at the same tme ? If I change the content in a row or column and someone else changes at the same time. which update is applied ??
Here's an article on working with multiple collaborators: http://help.smartsheet.com/customer/en/portal/articles/522069-working-with-multiple-collaborators
To answer your specific questions, yes multiple users can be working in the same sheet at the same time.
Here is a quote from the article to answer your question on users working on the same content:
"If you've both made changes to the same cell, the last saved change will be displayed in the cell. The first change made will be viewable by right-clicking on the cell (Mac users can [Ctrl]+click) and selecting View History."
