Lasso vs Excel & Google Sheets
This isn't really a competition. But we understand why you're here.
Excel and Google Sheets are not product data tools. They're the world's most flexible data containers, which is exactly why every team ends up using them for everything (including product data management) until they can't anymore.
You're probably here because your spreadsheet workflow is showing cracks. The supplier CSV that takes three hours to clean. The colleague who accidentally deleted column G. The export that doesn't match the store's import format. The 400-tab workbook nobody fully understands. We've seen it. It's fine. Here's what's actually going on.
A love letter to the spreadsheet
Let's be honest about what spreadsheets are genuinely great at. They're infinitely flexible. They're everywhere. Everyone knows how to use them at a basic level. They don't require onboarding. They're free (sort of). They've shipped more product catalogs than any purpose-built tool in existence. Respect.
The problem isn't the spreadsheet. The problem is using a general-purpose data container for a workflow that has very specific, recurring needs: ingesting supplier files in different formats, extracting attributes from messy data, maintaining a consistent schema across suppliers, running AI enrichment on hundreds of rows, and exporting in a format your store actually accepts.
At small scale, the spreadsheet wins every time. Ten products, two suppliers, one person. No tool beats a spreadsheet for that. The cracks appear at 200 products, five suppliers, three team members, and a monthly repeat cycle. That's not a spreadsheet problem. That's a workflow problem that a spreadsheet was never designed to solve.
What Lasso borrowed from the spreadsheet (intentionally)
Carries over
- A table you can see and edit directly, because hiding your data in a black box is worse
- Rows and columns as the primary mental model, because it works
- Formula columns, because sometimes you need computed values
- Filtering and sorting, because you need to find things
- Export to CSV, because everything downstream expects it
- The ability to fix things inline, because AI isn't always right
Doesn't carry over
- The 3-hour cleaning session every time a new supplier file arrives
- Explaining your column naming logic to every new team member
- The formula that breaks when someone adds a row in the wrong place
- Copying outputs from ChatGPT into cells one product at a time
- The export that's almost right but needs manual reformatting for the store
- The shared Google Sheet where two people edited the same column at the same time and now nobody knows which version is real
- The growing anxiety around opening a workbook that's been maintained by four different people over two years
When to stay in the spreadsheet. When to move.
Stay in Excel or Google Sheets if you have fewer than 50 products, one or two suppliers, and the workflow doesn't repeat often. The spreadsheet is genuinely the right tool. Don't fix what isn't broken.
Consider Lasso if your supplier data arrives in multiple formats, your team is more than one person, you run this process monthly or more, and the export-to-store step still requires manual work. Those are the signals that a spreadsheet is being asked to do something it wasn't designed for.
And if you're a spreadsheet power user who's built elaborate VLOOKUP chains, named ranges, and conditional formatting rules to approximate what a real product data workflow does: we see you. Lasso is what you've been building toward.
See what a purpose-built product data workspace looks like
Upload a supplier file you'd normally paste into a spreadsheet. See what happens when the tool is built specifically for this job.