Google Office To Get an API

Orange Crush writes, "Google's new office applications, Docs & Spreadsheets, will provide APIs for custom apps. Johnathan Rochelle, project manager: 'We definitely want to build out APIs, especially for the spreadsheets side, as spreadsheets are more data-oriented, but maybe also for the word processor. People will be able to do mashups with our tools for other things, and not be stuck behind our dev cycle for everything they want. If I've already got data somewhere you can't really rely on manual cut-and-paste to make it collaborative. Imagine pulling data from any application you've already got in use... you get that data over to the hosted app, make it collaborative, then bring it back... that's what we'd like to enable at some point.'" Eating their own dogfood: Rochelle said that "Everybody in [Google] is using the tool" already.

Comments

Another Look at Google Spreadsheet

[AKAImBatman]

I did a quicky review of Google's Spreadsheet when they released it six months ago. Since then, it would appear that Google has fixed some of my complaints. In particular:

1. Cell borders have been added.

Umm... that's all I've got. :(

Everything else still appears to be an issue, including the calculation errors I spotted. And while Cell Borders have been added, there is no way to apply different styles. I'm pleased to see that Google is adding a new API for their "Office Suite", but they really need to fix some of these issues before they can be taken seriously.

Also, the continuing lack of charting is really sticking out. Data visualization is an important feature in a spreadsheet, whether you're preparing a market analysis or just balancing your household budget. The fact that plenty of web technologies exist to accomplish charting (SVG, round trip images, Flash, Java, etc.) only makes it stick out that much more. Now the API might allow external coders to help in this area, but so far I'm still not impressed.

Re:Another Look at Google Spreadsheet

[SimplexO]

Let's take a look at that list from someone who uses the Spreadsheet app daily (personal finances):

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.

Let's not mock Google for trying something different. Because they use "ribbons," that bar up top is only visible when the formatting ribon is selected. I know that you've got Excel muscle memory and you want to go up to that function bar, but why should you have to click on a cell and then click up on the formatting bar when you can just edit by double clicking a cell and staying there. Open your mind and try something different. It might be better.

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

You're right, double-clicking a column header's edge doesn't auto resize, but since cells auto word wrap based on their contents, you can just resize a column until rows no longer wrap. This feature should be added -- it would be nice. It should also be easier to grab the column header's edge.

3. No size indicator when changing cell sizes.

This is a nice luxury feature I'd like to have (when resizing similar sheets to have the same column widths). Regardless, I don't really NEED it to do my work. That's just me though.

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.

If you highlight all the rows and then go to insert, you'll see that you can insert however many rows you have selected. For instance, if you select 100 rows, you'll get an option to add 100 rows up or 100 rows down. You can also right click on the row headers to get this option. Works the same for columns, too.

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.

You're not SOL, but you do have to do some work: You need to use the TEXT() function. Check this out to see what you can do with that function.

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

It's simple, but it works. Frustratingly, it seems that the common solution to most problems are to download, and open it in excel then update online. Maybe that'll change as the project matures.

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?

I don't know if you don't understand what it's supposed to be doing, but it emulates the pane feature in excel, where you can keep one or more header rows frozen as you scroll down. This works well for my financial stuff that I do. It'd be nice if they had the first couple of columns freezable too.

There are some downpoints, noticably the speed, especially when you've got lots of data and you do lots of calculations on it, or when slashdot covers it on the front page. When typing things, they stay up on the page while the server gets updated and that works for random text being added, but if the data you are changing changes other data, you'll have to wait for the server to catch up. Like I said, the column dividers could be easier to select. And the autofill feature could be smarter. That really hurts my productivity.

In excel, you could have two cells with values of 2 and 4 and then autofill the next couple of cells and you'd get 6 and 8. In Google, you'll get 3 and 5, then 4 and 6, and so on.

Tho

Good, but not usable if you need formatting.

[biendamon]

As I mentioned on an earlier Google Office thread, the word processor doesn't permit the kind of page formatting options that are an absolute necessity for a professional writer. Specifically, you can't define front-page headers, subsequent headers, or 8.5x11 inch page sizes with 1 inch margins.

Without those features, it's still OK, but no writer will use it as their word processor of choice.

yay mashups!

[daeg]

Hooray for Google allowing disallusioned bloggers to create mashups of other disallusioned bloggers using data from Google Spreadsheets into a Google Map where you can click on each user and write a message to them through an API to Blogger while simultaneously overlaying sixteen YouTube videoes while embedding a chat control to GTalk and Gmail and embedding a moon phase widget in your Google Pages tray bar along with a world clock showing the time in thirty-seven timezones simultaneously while using Google Sets to locate good stocks to show charts through Google Finanance in an expandable IFrame using Google UI Controls and integrating Google Search and Google News to be tied into the page so it automatically searches Google whenever you click on any word on the page and if you click on a non-alphanumeric it searches through Google Code Search and every image will be linked to Google Image Search and Google Image Labeler.

Re:api

[AKAImBatman]

what the heck is an api for the non-nerds out there?

Application Programmer Interface

Basically, a programatic way of accessing the functionality of Google's software.

Re:Offline Office at last

[nine-times]

It'd be nice if someone could make something that will sync your Google documents into a folder on your hard drive, maybe in .odt and ods format? It seems like the first thing I'd want from Google Docs&Spreadsheet.

Why are you people helping this maroon?

[drinkypoo]

what the heck is an api for the non-nerds out there?

Take a look at the top of the screen. See where it says "news for nerds"? Do you want that to be true, or don't you?

Re:Editing

[Jesterboy]

I was scanning through the headlines, and I didn't even notice the mistake you mentioned. I just thought Google's office was getting an API, which made me think something like...

public void(ProposedAction action) {
if(action.notEvil()) {
  action.allow();
  pilesOfMoney.throwAt(action);
}

Etc...

The Dogfood Tastes Bad.

[X43B]

"Eating their own dogfood: Rochelle said that "Everybody in [Google] is using the tool" already."

I'm just an aerospace engineer and not a programmer/scientist....but I thought Google hired the best of the best brightest minds in the country. True I use Matlab for most analysis and Fortran and C for most simulations, but when I want to "play" with a snippet of data a bit and do some simple plots, Excel kicks butt. I feel sorry for them if all those PhDs can't even graph with their spreadsheets anymore. I can understand them not wanting to pay Microsoft but geeze, at least throw them oocalc.

Valuation

[edusmoreira]

Eating their own dogfood: Rochelle said that "Everybody in [Google] is using the tool" already.

Now I understand why the CFO paid 1.6bn for GooTube!

Re:Good luck with ownership...

[Onan]

How do you know? You seem to be under the impression that you have total control over what you store in Gmail.

Well, among other things, I work at Google. And everything about Google's culture of data-handling is that privacy is taken very seriously, even internally. Even as an employee here, I couldn't just go and read your gmail (or search logs, or writely docs, or anything else) myself; I don't have access to it, and would need to make a very strong case for a legitimate need in order to get access to it. Selling it to an outside party would be completely antithetical to the entire way I've seen the company behave.

But let's focus on the "among other things", so you don't have to take my word for it. I think that even if you assume Google to be evil, the logistics of them being malicious here wouldn't really work out.

It's pretty hard to both 1) try to sell a product to outside entities and 2) keep the availability of that product secret. How exactly would Google go about offering your data up for sale without disclosing that it's doing so? And if such deals were somehow arranged, for how long exactly do you think that every advertiser would keep it secret? As with most conspiracy theories, I think this just involves too many moving parts to really be stable.

And even if we assume that Google has both the willingness and the means to make such sales in secret, I don't really see the motive for doing so. Why would advertisers want your email? To extract relevant information to run ads against it... the way that Google already does for them, to the best of their considerable ability, without any human eyes being involved? And why would Google risk the damage to their reputation associated with doing this? They're not exactly hurting for above-board income, you know.

I'm fairly paranoid about the privacy of my own data, so I can see why you'd have hesitation about handing yours over to anyone else. But I don't think that the particular threat being described is especially realistic.

(If it wasn't obvious, I'm not speaking for Google in any official capacity, I'm just talking about how their culture looks from the inside. The "do no evil" thing is not just marketing schtick, it really is something that people talk about and take seriously all the time.)

Version control for collaborative spreadsheets

[AxelBoldt]

Last time I checked, you could set up your Google spreadsheets for collaboration, but there was no version control, no way to find out who changed what when, and to revert changes. Has that since been added? Without it, I find collaboration impossible.