Google Workspace switch drags on amid Excel dependencies, compliance requirements, and compatibility issues

Exclusive Breaking free from Microsoft is harder than it looks. Airbus began migrating its 100,000-plus workforce from Office to Google Workspace more than seven years ago and it still hasn't completed the switch.

As we exclusively revealed in March 2018, the aerospace giant told 130,000 employees it was ditching Microsoft's productivity tools for Google's cloud-based alternatives.

Then-CEO Tom Enders predicted migration would finish in 18 months, a timeline that, in hindsight, was "extremely ambitious," according to Catherine Jestin, Airbus's executive vice president of digital.

Today, more than two-thirds of Airbus's 150,000 employees have fully transitioned, but significant pockets remain on Microsoft tools.

Finance, for example, still relies on Excel because Google Sheets can't handle the necessary file sizes, as some spreadsheets involve 20 million cells. "Some of the limitations was just the number of cells that you could have in one ...