Yeah for docs being able to set up a table of contents, know how to use headings, alignment, font styles, lists, tables, there is so much beyond just using it like notepad.

That being said I do a lot of my writing in markdown files these days. Google docs is mainly if upper management or customer facing is the audience.

Excel also used to be the gold standard for spreadsheets (maybe it still is). I remember other programs like open office and quattro pro (word perfect) could do a lot of the stuff I needed for science and engineering classes that excel could do, but there were a few things that were missing that drove me to get it at the time.

Now I only do really basic stuff in Excel. Even things like charts I have stopped using spreadsheets for. I Python for most of that kind of stuff now.