Excel vs Google Sheets Formulas: What Actually Differs

Most lookup and logic functions exist in both Excel and Google Sheets. The failures happen at the edges: Sheets-only QUERY, Excel-only XLOOKUP on older files, and ARRAYFORMULA vs dynamic arrays.

Lookups

Sheets has XLOOKUP in current accounts, but shared files opened by older Excel still need VLOOKUP or INDEX/MATCH. Approximate match (tax brackets) uses VLOOKUP TRUE or XLOOKUP match_mode -1. Never run approximate match on an unsorted ID list.

Fill-down

Excel 365 spills UNIQUE and FILTER from one cell. Sheets often needs ARRAYFORMULA wrapping IF(A2:A="", "", …) so new rows fill without copying. If you copy an ARRAYFORMULA into Excel it will not expand the same way.

QUERY vs SUMIFS

Sheets QUERY can SELECT, WHERE, GROUP BY, and ORDER BY in one string. Excel’s closest live equivalent is a SUMIFS matrix or a pivot. Date literals inside QUERY must be date 'yyyy-mm-dd'.

Separators

This generator always emits comma-separated arguments. If your Excel locale expects semicolons, Excel usually converts on paste. If it does not, replace commas between arguments — not commas inside quoted text.