Excel vs Google Sheets: the formula compatibility guide

Most Excel-vs-Sheets comparisons argue about collaboration and price. This one covers the part that silently breaks when you switch: the formulas — which functions exist on each side, where the same function behaves differently, and how to keep a workbook portable.

The numbers

• 469 functions are documented for BOTH Excel and Google Sheets — the shared core where most everyday work lives.
• 53 functions are Excel-only (full list): PIVOTBY, GROUPBY, the CUBE family, AGGREGATE… Importing an .xlsx that uses them leaves #NAME? cells in Sheets.
• 47 functions are Sheets-only (full list): QUERY, ARRAYFORMULA, IMPORTRANGE, GOOGLEFINANCE, the REGEX family… These die on export to Excel.

Same function, different dialect

The subtler traps are functions both apps HAVE but spell differently:

• Array formulas. Sheets wraps per-row math in ARRAYFORMULA(...); modern Excel just spills array expressions natively. Exporting a Sheet frequently degrades wrapped arithmetic to a single-cell result — details in ARRAYFORMULA vs dynamic arrays.
• Filtering with SQL. Sheets’ QUERY has no Excel equivalent at all; the portable subset is FILTER/SORT/UNIQUE — see FILTER vs QUERY.
• Regular expressions. REGEXMATCH/REGEXEXTRACT/REGEXREPLACE are Sheets-only; Excel’s closest tools are SEARCH wildcards and TEXTBEFORE/TEXTAFTER.
• Version skew inside Excel itself. XLOOKUP, FILTER, LAMBDA and friends need Excel 2021+/365 — a current Sheet can be MORE compatible with modern functions than a 2019 Excel install.

Keeping a workbook portable

1. Stick to the shared core — paste any formula into the compatibility checker and it flags every function per app.
2. Prefer FILTER/SORT/UNIQUE compositions over QUERY, and native ranges over ARRAYFORMULA, when a file might ever leave Sheets.
3. Avoid the newest Excel exclusives (GROUPBY, PIVOTBY) in files that co-workers will open in Sheets.
4. Test the round trip: export, reopen, and search for #NAME? and #REF!.

Where LibreOffice fits

LibreOffice Calc reads both formats and — unlike either vendor’s docs — we can actually EXECUTE formulas in it: 586 functions live-tested across 24.2.0.3, 24.8.7.2, 25.2.0.3, 25.8.7.3. Its modern-function support now tracks Excel closely (XLOOKUP since 24.8, the dynamic-array batch since 25.8 — see support by version), and several “Excel-only” functions like AGGREGATE work fine there, making it a viable escape hatch for files Sheets can’t fully open.

Excel for the web is a third engine — and it isn’t desktop Excel

If you’re weighing Sheets against the free Excel, that free Excel is Excel for the web, which runs its own calculation engine separate from the desktop product. We execute it too — a dated OneDrive recalculation of the same corpus (most recently 2026-09-01) — and because it is a different engine it sometimes disagrees with Microsoft’s own desktop documentation. POWER(0,0) comes back #NUM! in Excel for the web where the docs (and both Google Sheets and LibreOffice, executed) return 1; other functions the desktop docs describe compute a different value or a different error in the web engine. Those measured web results sit in their own column on each function page, labelled as the web app and never merged into the desktop-Excel column, which stays documentation only. So if your Excel is the browser one, read that column — not the desktop docs.

Every claim here is backed by the underlying pages: per-function verdicts, behavioral quirks, the function equivalents table, and the verification methodology.