I've used ms office and google apps for years. For lightweight day to day use, google, hands down. Nearly every document I create is shared, and MS as of a few years back doesn't compare. I haven't tried the new office.
For serious spreadsheet work with layout requirements, Numbers, easy. Yes, Numbers. For super-serious something or other I hear Excel is unbeatable, but I don't know what functions Excel has that google doesn't, let alone Numbers, and Numbers has the one feature every spreadsheet should have and almost none do (certainly not excel/google): allow two sheets on a single page. How often do you have to juggle column widths/cell merges to get different layouts in two parts of your worksheet? No more! With Numbers you can draw out multiple separate sheets, each with their own column widths/row heights and other formatting, no problem.
And for large data sets, or data that requires extensive filtering or specialized presentation, FileMaker, no question. It blows all spreadsheets away when it comes to: hundreds of thousands of rows (or millions), and it supports limitless separate views of the same data. Anyone who does serious work in excel that includes large data, normalize-able data, or extensive presentation or filtering, you owe it to yourself to check out FileMaker.
For serious spreadsheet work with layout requirements, Numbers, easy. Yes, Numbers. For super-serious something or other I hear Excel is unbeatable, but I don't know what functions Excel has that google doesn't, let alone Numbers, and Numbers has the one feature every spreadsheet should have and almost none do (certainly not excel/google): allow two sheets on a single page. How often do you have to juggle column widths/cell merges to get different layouts in two parts of your worksheet? No more! With Numbers you can draw out multiple separate sheets, each with their own column widths/row heights and other formatting, no problem.
And for large data sets, or data that requires extensive filtering or specialized presentation, FileMaker, no question. It blows all spreadsheets away when it comes to: hundreds of thousands of rows (or millions), and it supports limitless separate views of the same data. Anyone who does serious work in excel that includes large data, normalize-able data, or extensive presentation or filtering, you owe it to yourself to check out FileMaker.