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.

Comments

spreading themselves thin

[Douglas Simmons]

Anybody nervous that Google may be letting their eye off the ball (their original business model) by going off on these tangential projects?

Re:spreading themselves thin

[Gulthek]

Why nervous? Oh no, a successful company is continuing to expand?

Why should anyone be nervous when a company continues to do what it does well?

Re:spreading themselves thin

[MrSquirrel]

What about when Sears created the Discover card (which is now its own company and Sears' future looks gloomy) or when the Wright brothers built a flying machine in their bicycle shop. It's a fundamental of business -- change is fact: you can either be part of it or watch it happen. Google is simply applying their resources to expand the productivity they offer the average user. I like it.

Re:spreading themselves thin

[ceejayoz]

I'm betting they're doing it to make Microsoft take their eye off Google's ball - search and contextual ads.

Re:spreading themselves thin

[Nested]

Although not their original business model, selling contextual ads has by far been their most succesful. In that sense, this new app supports that objective nicely.

Re:spreading themselves thin

[david.given]

It's a fundamental of business -- change is fact: you can either be part of it or watch it happen.

Not necessarily; for 37 years, the WD40 company produced exactly one product (I'll leave figuring out what they make as an exercise to the reader).

There's a difference between change necessary to adapt to a changing marketplace, and change simply for the sake of change.

Re:spreading themselves thin

[icepick72]

No because Google has money has the money to waste. Not all the employees can be focused on search and advertising. Belive me, they have enough resources on search and advertising to not be dropping the golden ball.
Anyways, if they do drop the ball, somebody else will be happy to replace them. No worries there either ... unless you have Google stock.

Re:spreading themselves thin

[WickedLogic]

Google provides a services which is somewhat hard to do well (search). It makes money by selling ads (mainly) and services around what it does well (search). The more content there is, the harder it will be for google to have competition that will be able to sprout up, due to data glut.

Remove the expensive cost of content tools, and more people can create more content, which they will WANT to search through. At the same time, remove your supposed competitors major source of revenue by fulfilling a need it would not, software that works, is light weight, and is free/cheap (good enough). This isn't just a smart move, it's about a shift in technology to provide people what they want and moving them toward benefiting your business model (designed to make money around what people want).

Want to see another point you may have missed? (major speculation) Telco's limit content in a tiered system, google buys a little more dark fiber and lights it up. Starts a local isp business through techies who don't want a tiered net, and act as partners in a 'mashup' of reselling google network access. Us local techies not liking telco or nsa habits of late, serve as local wifi resellers via mesh networks to solve the 'last mile' problem. All the time, solving our consumer problems and generating ad revenue for google.

Google has smart people doing smart things solving real problems with simple and very obvious solutions. No, I don't work for google, but if their looking... grin.

Re:spreading themselves thin

[I Like Pudding]

Anybody nervous that Google may be letting their eye off the ball (their original business model) by going off on these tangential projects?

No, most people are psyched about it. Long term R&D is something that is hardly encouraged anymore due to quarterly earnings pressure (*cough* HP *cough). Google, on the other hand, actually schedules programmers to work on side projects of their own design. They hire very smart people to think up the Next Big Thing so that they can exploit it. Contrast this with Microsoft expansion policy: throw massive amounts of cash at heavily entrenched markets, then fail to generate any profit. I much prefer Google's method to Microsoft's "send more men over the top" WW1-style attrition.

Re:spreading themselves thin

[smittyoneeach]

the average user

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.

Re:spreading themselves thin

[gEvil (beta)]

Hmmm. Based on the model number you've given, I'm going to guess that it was a Washer/Dryer combo unit.

Re:spreading themselves thin

[redtape]

OK, I'll bite:
http://www.wd40.com/Brands/index.html

Lists:
Lava, 2000 flushes, Carpet Fresh, 3-in-ONE, Lava Pro, X-14, and Spot Shot in addition to WD-40.
So which is the one product?

Re:spreading themselves thin

[alucinor]

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.)

Re:spreading themselves thin

[tak amalak]

WD-40 stands for Water Displacement, 40th attempt. Has a much better ring than WD-17 or WD-666.

Re:spreading themselves thin

[omeomi]

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.

Re:spreading themselves thin

[birge]

What about when Sears created the Discover card (which is now its own company and Sears' future looks gloomy) or when the Wright brothers built a flying machine in their bicycle shop. It's a fundamental of business -- change is fact: you can either be part of it or watch it happen. Google is simply applying their resources to expand the productivity they offer the average user. I like it.

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.

Re:spreading themselves thin

[Mr. Underbridge]

No because Google has money has the money to waste. Not all the employees can be focused on search and advertising. Belive me, they have enough resources on search and advertising to not be dropping the golden ball. Anyways, if they do drop the ball, somebody else will be happy to replace them. No worries there either ... unless you have Google stock.

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.

Re:spreading themselves thin

[NatasRevol]

Unless, you know, they want to search everyone's spreadsheets to monitor trends. Kind of like they do with gMail.

Re:spreading themselves thin

[hackstraw]

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.

Google could take the low end of the Office market

[peterdaly]

The key to this being an "Excel Killer" is not that it needs to be able to do everything (or even most) of what Excel can do. Most people barely use probably 2% of Excel's capabilities, and don't even know how to use much of the other 98%.

The key to putting some hurt onto Excel sales, and MS Office in general is for Google to offer things like this that are "good enough" for the mass of home users that use 2% of Excel's product offerings. I personally have started using this for a couple personal spreadsheets that I have, where the network availability is more useful than having the whiz-bang Excel features.

Let's not forget that Google has also purchased Writely, which may be a "good enough" web based word processor to start attracting the mass of people who use Word as a fancy notepad.exe with spell-check. I don't need a heavy duty Word processor for most of what I do, and many other home users don't either. Writely is not yet available for users to register, unless they got in pre-Google.

While the Writely and Google Spreadsheets combo are not "killer apps" in terms of features, they may have enough functionality to put a serious dent in the very low end of Microsoft's user base.

Undocumented functions?

[DikSeaCup]

"... it has most of Excel's functions -- including some that aren't listed or documented."

Does that include vulnerabilities that act as infection vehicles for viruses/worms?

Why no ODF?

[thebdj]

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.

Re:Google could take the low end of the Office mar

[AKAImBatman]

The key to this being an "Excel Killer" is not that it needs to be able to do everything (or even most) of what Excel can do. Most people barely use probably 2% of Excel's capabilities, and don't even know how to use much of the other 98%.

Yeah, but you still need to get to the 2% mark. I'm looking at this review, and I am utterly dumbfounded at some of the features it's lacking. For example, Charts would be incredibly easy to compute on the server, then download as images. Alternatively, they could use SVG support, or canvas support, or Javascript Drawings. 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.

Similarly, the lack of online help is a no-no for a spreadsheet program. Users still need to do computations, even if they're as simple as addition, subtraction, averaging, and weighted averaging. Failing to include online help means that users will have no idea how to properly compute these formulas. Even just dropping the expected args into the text field would do wonders for usability!

All in all, this article makes me believe that Google is buying into this "users don't need that much" mantra that makes sites like ajaxLaunch so laughable. GMail "won" because it provided a completely new way to work with email. It wasn't just the best Webmail apps, it was better than even installable apps! If Google wants to follow that success, they need to take that sort of innovation (*blech* sorry, weasel word) into their other office products. Otherwise, they're going nowhere, fast.

Re:Google could take the low end of the Office mar

[cygnusx]

> 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.

Re:Google could take the low end of the Office mar

[iznogud]

Only problem with "Most people barely use 2% of Excel's capabilities, let's implement just that 2%" theory is - not all people use the same 2% of Excel, or any other software packet.

One missing feature...

[vishbar]

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!

Problems importing

[SamMichaels]

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.

Chasing The Long Tail

[WombatControl]

Google's doing this in a rather smart way, IMHO...

They're not chasing Excel's market. Nobody's going to be using this for business-critical applications, and this won't challenge the corporate market for Office. What Google is doing is chasing the long tail of the market - the people who might want to use a spreadsheet, but have no need for Excel. Let's face it, for a quick and dirty budget, a team roster, or a simple document, Excel is more than overkill.

What Google Spreadsheets has that Excel doesn't is simple collaboration -- no need to install SharePoint servers or any of that other Microsoft lock-in garbage required. Just add a few emails to a field and you're done. That is ideal for a whole host of simple, small projects. Say you're running a small business and want to have online schedules -- would you use Excel and some expensive Microsoft server setup, or just make a simple spreadsheet with Google and share it amongst your employees? It seems pretty easy to guess which one is the easiest and least painful option to someone without an IT budget.

Google knows that if they try to compete with Office, they'll get crushed. So they're not doing that at all. Google Spreadsheets isn't an enterprise app, it's a quick and dirty system for simple tasks -- and it excels at being what it is. By capturing that long tail of users who don't need Excels features and won't pay Excel's price, Google can pick up a sizeable user base. The real question is what Google intends to do with those users and how they'll turn this into a revenue generator.

Enter the Ribbon

[Anonymous Coward]

I had no idea what a "Ribbon" was so I googled it, and found this page: Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog which neatly summarises a ribbon:

One of the core components of the new user experience is something we call the "Ribbon." The Ribbon is a strip across the top of the window that exposes what the program can do.

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.

Re:Enter the Ribbon

[PPGMD]

Commenting on something you haven't used, how very slashdot of you.

I have the Office 2007 Beta, yes the Ribbons are different from the old version, but after a couple of days of working with them, they became natural, one benefit is that they are very flexible so you can have a very similar GUI between all the applications, something Office hasn't always had. Sure it's not a single reason to upgrade (heck I use Crystal 8.5 for some of my work, it has a horrendous GUI), but it's a nice upgrade to be had, and I am sure somewhere there is a menu where you can turn it back to the old style.

Re:Google could take the low end of the Office mar

[sirinek]

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.

No thanks!

[kimvette]

I'll stick with keeping spreadsheets on my own hard drive and servers, created with OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Excel.

Thanks, but no thanks Google. I do use gmail for personal stuff but I do not and will not use hosted office suites. I have no desire for you to know how much I weigh, what my client lists are, how much I spend, my DVD and CD collections, or anything else I might use a spreadsheet for.

Can't deal with large spreadsheets?

[kiscica]

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.

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 :-) 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).

Kiscica

Re:Google could take the low end of the Office mar

[AKAImBatman]

Just something I noticed. If you have a GMail account, and you've requested to be in the Beta Testing of the spreadsheet program, you may already be approved! I never received a confirmation from Google (perhaps it got caught in the Spam filter?), but I just went to http://spreadsheets.google.com/ and found that I could log in!

I have to say, the sheet has a nice feel to it. It really reminds you of Excel or OpenOffice Calc. Unfortunately, this comparison is quickly disappated once you start using it. Things I've noticed:

1. Formulas are edited in the cell rather than having a text field on top. This is REALLY annoying to anyone who uses a spreadsheet program regularly. There is an uneditable text field at the top (doesn't work right in Mozilla 1.7.12), but it's not useful for anything other than ogleing at.

2. Auto-resizing by double-clicking doesn't work. This is a core feature that I should think that everyone uses.

3. No size indicator when changing cell sizes. I don't know about anyone else, but I always try to resize my sheets to about 14.25 points high, as this looks best. In addition, the indicator is a good way of knowing that you've got the right size for a row, rather than by messing with trial and error.

4. You're limited to 100 x T cells. If you're one of those people with a lot of data, good luck. It doesn't look like Google will let you store it without manually inserting enough rows or columns to hold it all.

5. The formatting menu is useless. It's got a few data types, and that is IT. If you need a custom style, or a date in one of the billion other formats, you're SOL.

6. No cell borders. Raise your hand if you tend to mark headers with a cell border. (/Me raises hand.)

7. The "Freeze Rows" command makes no sense. Why are you choosing the number of rows from a menu, when a multiple row-select exists?

8. Sorting! Yippe! Now I can make my sheet into a database! (/sarcasm) Seriously, this feature actually works. I was expecting it to choke on numbers by treating them as text, but it automatically sorted then correctly. Score one for the team.

There's a lot of other minor annoyances that I won't get into, but the above are the big ones. Unfortunately, I've just about covered 90% of the functionality. My verdict? It's not ready for prime time. If Google wanted to do this, perhaps they should have teamed up with Sun's StarOffice team.

Tried it...

[Bluesman]

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.

I can use this!

[rueger]

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.

Re:Google could take the low end of the Office mar

[jfengel]

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.

Making Microsoft Irrelevant

[AVryhof]

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..

Google's eye IS on the ball

[artemis67]

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.