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Hands on: Google Spreadsheets
feminazi writes "Google spreadsheets are more powerful than you might think, according to Richard Ericson. The free, Web-based service doesn't currently offer encryption, but the clean interface has standard drop-down menus, icons and buttons (just when MS is switching to "ribbons"). You can use it to work with existing files and "Formatting is simple, direct and fast. ... Sort, does precisely what you'd expect." Most importantly, it has most of Excel's functions -- including some that aren't listed or documented." We covered the launch of this program last week.
I am really wondering about this. I mean I am sure it is on the list of things to do, but I would think the OpenDocument Format would have been a bit easier to implement then working with XLS would have been. Granted more people use Excel then OOo, but I still find it strange that ODF wasn't in the list of early supported file formats.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
I'm betting they're doing it to make Microsoft take their eye off Google's ball - search and contextual ads.
> While the Writely and Google Spreadsheets combo are not "killer apps" in terms of features
Actually, Writely and Google Spreadsheet are Labs toys right now. However fast forward one year, with Firefox sporting an embedded database, and Writely and Spreadsheets will look far less toy-like. Add support for rich controls from the WHAT-WG and in a couple of ears you have an office suite you can download on demand and run inside your browser. And you can work with it offline.
And if you think Microsoft hasn't read the writing on the wall, you haven't been looking at XAML and IE7 very closely.
When I was at work, I decided to give Google Spreadsheets a shot (it wasn't for anything critical, just some simple calculations). I noticed one feature that, surprisingly, was not implemented--as far as I know, Google Spreadsheets can't merge cells vertically. Cells can only be merged horizontally. I ended up having to use Excel because of this one tiny missing feature. However, it's still in beta, and I am really impressed with what they've done. It's the second-coolest AJAX app out there (the first being Meebo).
Keep up the good work, Google!
Ride the skies
TFA mentions you lose some formatting...but I've had a ton of problems importing XLS. The majority of the time it adds random characters to the cells.
Overall, I agree that it'll be a cool app. Right now it's just very beta and not usable in the real world so it's difficult to give a real review.
Following that description was an image which apparently shows a ribbon. I'm still having difficulty grasping where the ribbon starts and other user interface controls end because the image appears to be almost entirely full of user interface controls.
The webpage went on to say: "One of the concepts behind the Ribbon is that it's the one and only place to look for functionality in the product. If you want to look through Word 2003 to find an unfamiliar command, you need to look through 3 levels of hierarchical menus, open up 31 toolbars and peruse about 20 Task Panes. It's hard to formulate a "hunting" strategy to find the thing you're looking for because there's no logical path through all of the UI."
Well, this is one of those Duh! statements. There's no logical path through the User Interface because Microsoft has no strong conceptual model of the document or the application functionality. Therefore functions are placed almost at random within the menus, toolbars and task panes.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I thought the menus were supposed to expose all the application functionality. "Ribbons" sound to me as though they are merely replacing menus. Perhaps they have more flexible layout.
Overall it seems to me like Microsoft is implementing Ribbons as yet more eye candy to attract people to upgrade. The talk of increased usability is merely lip service, misdirection from the fundamental problem that I have with Microsoft's user interfaces. The page mentions that "most people don't click on an unlabeled 16x16 icon". Microsoft's at fault here for their feature-driven requirements. It seems to me that a requirement of Microsoft user interfaces (particularly Word and Excel) is that every possible piece of screen real estate needs to have some function: either an icon or clicking with the mouse will do something. That makes the interface incredibly busy - not good for newbies, perhaps not necessary for experienced users.
Yet they completely leave charts out! I don't know of a single Excel user who hasn't charted their data at some point in time. If Google isn't supporting this, then they can expect users to dislike their spreadsheet.
I don't use charting on Excel, and I gather a lot of others don't either. A fairly sizable number of people use excel in place of a database for things like contact management or inventories. It's not a feature that'd be critical to have available in a beta test.
Bill Gates got where his is by targeting "the average user", who didn't care about the difference between logical and physical partitions, root and user accounts, and command-line interfaces.
The advent of cheap bandwidth and free browsers affords Google the opportunity to out-Redmond Redmond.
As for the spreadsheet product, when the xpcom programming interfaces for Firefox support the kind of ad-hack programming achievable with MS-Office and VBA (hopefully without the insecurities), it'll be time to start going short on MSFT. I like it.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Working a bit in litigation support, I know that a significant amount of time and money is spent trying to make excel spreadsheets presentable as evidence in a courtroom (Arthur Anderson anyone?). There is an entire industry supported by excel being a whopping pile of crap to work with. If a better alternative were to take the market, it would definitely be championed by a world full of corporate lawyers. And I'm sure the lack of privacy is making the NSA positively bubbling with anticipation.
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I thought it might be interesting to import into Google Spreadsheets the database I keep of my movie collection. That's about 2,000 lines long, by a few columns, but first I just tried a single column of titles. Nothing fancy -- just a sorted list. I made a .csv file and uploaded it -- it was only about 50K, so that step was plenty fast.
:-) A pity, 'cause having these online from anywhere I can get to Google was an intriguing idea (although I have my own site for that). My impression of Google Spreadsheet is "neat, but basically toy." I don't use Excel very often either, but I do know it has no trouble with spreadsheets that are tens of thousands of lines long (nor would I expect any modern standalone spreadsheet to).
When I tried to actually open the imported spreadsheet with Google Spreadsheet, however, it just hung. I waited about an hour then killed Firefox. Tried twice with the same result.
That was with 2,000 lines; I guess I'm not going to be trying the application out with my 30,000-line book collection database or my 25,000-line record collection database any time soon
Kiscica
Their mission is to organize the world's information and make it accessible to everyone. But Google doesn't really "organize information" so much as provide an organized view of information -- and that means creating user interfaces. Of course, this is what worries Microsoft, because as of now, they're the most common interface people use to bridge the gap between humans and technology, but search engines and portals like Google and Yahoo are quickly becoming the most common and important interfaces.
So I'm sure Google wants to experiment with and learn as many interface models as possible, since different information requires different kinds of organization and presentation. As far as I'm concerned, they've nailed email and maps, though still have a ways to go with many of their other services.
(As an aside, we can probably expect more integration of these services in the future. Google probably keeps all the data created via its services in a form similar to the Semantic Web -- just a proprietary version of it. I suspect that just as the relatively high level of integration provided by Microsoft applications raised people's expectations and led to a new era of cooperation between the non-MS tech companies, so also the level of integration Google's services provide for the web will be the driving factor that leads to increased collaboration in the Semantic Web: the push for a neutral commodity platform.)
random underscore blankspace at ya know hoo dot comedy.
I am far more nervous about MS branching out into areas they have no experience in. Google by nature has proven to be ethical about its businesss/privacy actions. MS has always put security/privacy behind profits. This scares me.
Bill Gates got where his is by targeting "the average user", who didn't care about the difference between logical and physical partitions, root and user accounts, and command-line interfaces.
Bill Gates got where he is by convincing IBM that they weren't losing anything by allowing Microsoft to own all the rights to the operating system that came pre-installed on their computers, thus opening the door for the massive launch of IBM-clone companies, saturating the market. He was in the right time at the right place, and made the right decision.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
Just last week I was wishing there were an online spreadsheet so I could organize some simple budgets from the thousand different computers I use. I love having my gmail account because it's a decent enough mail client that I can access from anywhere and doesn't require any maintenance on my part.
But the spreadsheet was just not ready for prime time. The limitations of a browser hacked to do what really should be done by a local app really showed. Even the most basic things didn't work as expected (copy/paste buttons instead of working shortcuts? No thanks.)
What would be ideal would be enough easily browsable online storage so that I could work on my spreadsheet locally and save it online. There's no way for Google to make money off such a thing, though, so I don't see it happening. (And yes, I know about the gmail-based filesystem that Linux has.)
I really wish we'd get away from the idea that all of these apps have to be implemented in a browser over HTTP. There's a reason nobody ever developed a GUI toolkit that works like that -- and it's because it's a horrible mess, and makes simple things hard and hard things impossible.
Unfortunately, with the way people are diving head-first into AJAX because it's the latest thing, I'm sure we'll be stuck with it forever.
Next stop -- an AJAX web browser. Mostly feature complete.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
I'm working with team in another country right now. We've been emailing Excel sheets back and forth to track a variety of issues. This is a tool that is perfect for our needs.
We don't need super encrypted security, but we do need an easy way to keep our work in sync. We really don't want to start installing new tools for just one project.
Google has winner on their hands with this one. It's good enough for many jobs, simpler than Excel, and makes sharing a spreadsheet simple and fast.
Three Squirrels
I've worked with it on exactly one relatively simple spreadsheet, and I found numerous bugs just in that time:
* Some important formatting disappeared. Not just column widths, but numerical formatting. The difference between "currency" and "not currency" is very important for the look of the sheet.
* Re-exporting to Excel had a bug: it capitalized the sheet names, but didn't propagate that to formulas. Any formula that referenced another sheet became #VALUE
* Even for the small spreadsheet I was using (a few sheets, dozens-not-thousands of rows and columns), scrolling was very, ver slow.
This fairly simple sheet is what I think of as a canonical app for Google Spreadsheets: not mission critical, not large, not full of database lookups or macros. Maybe those are just beta complaints, but I've got to concur with your verdict: not ready for prime time.
Do you know how many airplanes the Wrights SOLD? Do you see any of their bikes still being made? And you said yourself Sears is going down. Perhaps they would've done better to focus on their core business. Change IS good, but so is recognizing your limitations and core competency. People aren't arguing Google can't do this ok, they are just wondering if its a good idea to divert resources towards spreadsheets, of all things.
Google is trying to distract microsoft in a big way. Some small apps and strategically done publicity will have the whole world raving about "the Office Killer" from Google. It will surely hurt MS's core competency. At the same time it will also divert MS and others from concentrating on Google's USP, search. /bin/laden) and charts and all other frills.
Not that I'm saying google spreadsheet is an eye wash. I have used it and I liked it. But it is not an excel killer. More akin to my cousin's final semester project. Cute, Usable but not an office alternative for vast majority of users - not unles it has macros ( yeah, I know they are the next in security threat after
I'd agree, except that their search hasn't improved in years, and they still haven't figured out how to(or just don't want to) get rid of the useless Made For Adsense (R) pages that are clogging searches these days.
"My question is, who needs a web-based spreadsheet? Maybe I'm clueless, but I don't understand the target."
One example would be my fiancee and I. We don't live together, and are working on wedding stuff. We have a budget spreadsheet, invite list spreadsheet, and a registry spreadsheet. Up until this went live we had to modify and email it back and forth with a bunch of versions.
Of course this could've been done from sharepoint or through Office, but honestly google spreadsheets is easier.
Unless, you know, they want to search everyone's spreadsheets to monitor trends. Kind of like they do with gMail.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Those are things that throwing more resources at, isn't going to help. Those type of things require a more dedicated and devoted group of thinkers at Google. If Google was to stop peripheral activities, I think you still would not immediately see difference in the problems listed. Ever heard the saying "Too many cooks in the kitchen" ? ... 'nuff said.
Google is doing what they are destined to do. Think about it for a minute.
With an online Spreadsheet, Word Processor (writely), E-Mail, and Web Page Editor on top of supporting a Web Browser that runs on just about all of the most popular platforms (Firefox Of Course) Most home users will no longer need to have Office installed, or even Windows at that.
I know many people who are happy using Wordpad to do word processing, and just use Excel for simple things like their check book, lists of stuff, and such. Well... Writely and Google Spreadsheet fit the bill, Gmail can effectively be a replacement for Outlook to MOST USERS (not all) Gmail for domains, no more need for Exchange server, Google hosts it... Google Pages... replace Frontpage and IIS at the same time.
Now that this all comes together think about this. Got a computer with Firefox, Mozilla, or a recent release of Netscape? If you don't... you can for FREE. Now think about this. Dell starts shipping Google software preinstalled on their machines...(yeah, you read it here) They already have a portal with Google. How hard would it be to sell their entry-level systems with links to these applications as their Office suite? Piece of cake! They have just replaced MS Works, or that Word Perfect Demo that came with my machine at work... for free, through an alliance they have already made.
How much of a jump is it to offer a Linux box with the same thing... no problem at all..it all works.
That is how Google can make Microsoft Irrelevant, and Microsoft knows this, so they see Google as their biggest threat.
Just another conspiracy, or are the facts too irrefutable to ignore?
My 2 cents..
Make America grate again!
Think of it... all of the Google Spreadsheet files are stored on THEIR servers. When you open up your files, just like with GMail, the content will be searched for keywords and relevant AdWords will be displayed on the page. It's not that way now, but it's coming.
And who is to say that Google won't index those files to create a marketing profile of you?
The more of your data Google owns, the more sophisticated their profile of you becomes.
Also, think about this spreadsheet as the first step towards a Google-created, simplified online relational database tool for the average user. Change the model from "person with hardware and installed software developing tools, data, files that reside on said hardware and are shared in limited fashion with others" to "person with hardware and online/distributed softare developing tools, data, files that reside on global, secure servers and are shared according to controlled permissions".
This model obviously won't work for any data that needs to be absolutely secure or is entirely proprietary, but most of the data on the net doesn't fall in that category.
If google had the chance to make the kind of impact on the world and on history that the Wright Brothers did, I'm pretty sure they would trade that kind of impact for the chance for their search business to be successful 105 years later.
That would be like saying, "Man. If scientists Exxon were to invent cold fusion that would TOTALLY UNDERMINE THEIR GAS BUSINESS because someone else might steal the design and make more money off of it!"
No because Google has money has the money to waste.
Give me a break. Google is simply different than most companies in this world. Waste? Yeah, that is why they picked a freely available operating system and still to this day use cheap OTS diskless servers so that they can save money. That is why every employee spends 20% of their time working on side projects. Oh, and those side projects have created things like gmail, and I would assume this spreadsheet program as well.
Waste and haste are not in the Google mantra. They leave stuff in beta status forever. They have tons of little side projects like Google trends Google sets, the list goes on and on.
These guys are NOT the typical wasteful dot bomb guys of the late 90s. Most of those guys are out of business, Google seems to be doing pretty good.