Google Launches Online Spread Sheet Beta

[DudeAsInCool]

Google Spreadsheets turns up heat on Excel

Google is set to launch on Tuesday a Web-based spreadsheet program that will allow people to view and simultaneously edit data while conducting "in-document" chat, a company product manager said Monday.

The launch of Google Spreadsheets puts the search engine in even more heated competition with Microsoft, whose desktop-based Excel spreadsheet program is a standard office tool.

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Source: CNet

[NelsonG]

I'm gonna try it ... :)

[DudeAsInCool]

Google Spreadsheets: Very Basic, Pretty Interesting

Google Spreadsheets is, indeed live--but not yet, alas, open to all comers. Try to get in for the first time, and it'll let you get in a first-come-first-served queue; I did, and got in, and found that this service, which is a "Google Labs" experiment is very simple (don't shred your copy of Excel quite yet!) and has gaping holes in terms of even basic functionality...but it's nifty for what it is.

As I mentioned in my last post, I've tried a bunch of AJAX-y spreadsheets and hadn't found one that had all the basics of Excel-like user-interface behavior down pat. Google Spreadsheets does--use the mouse, arrow keys, and other means of input, and they almost always do what you'd expect. The service is a tad sluggish at times--especially when opening, closing, importing, and exporting spreadsheets--but for the most part, it's acceptably snappy. (Deleting a worksheet from a file, however, has been agonizingly slow in my informal experiments.)

In terms of mimicking standard spreadsheet features...well, it does many of the the things you'd expect, with a good library of formulas, multiple worksheet support, and reasonably rich formatting features (I was happy to see that you can merge cells). I've only imported a couple of Excel spreadsheets so far, but they came in more or less intact. (However, the one with fairly fancy filtering in Excel came in minus its filtering drop-downs.)

What Google Spreadsheets does, it does quite well, but there are far more Excel-type features that it doesn't even attempt to emulate than ones that it does. (Zoho Sheet, just to pick one competitor, does a lot more at the moment.) There's no printing feature beyond what you can get from your browser. Sorting is bare-bones. You can freeze rows but not (as far as I can tell) columns, and there's no charting whatsoever. And any Excel feature that's even a tiny bit advanced simply isn't here.

Read all about at

PC World

Or give it a test spin :)

[method77]

web based programs are a hustle

[DudeAsInCool]

web based programs are a hustle

why are free programs a hustle?

[Malicious Intent]

They are a hassle...

[method77]

I meant hassle. Couldn't remember how it was spelled

[DudeAsInCool]

I meant hassle. Couldn't remember how it was spelled