Google Spreadsheets - Our review
At Bytestart, we keep an eye on all Google "new releases" with interest. Google Analytics is an excellent (and free) site traffic analysis tool, and other applications such as the Toolbar and Gmail have been happily adopted by many millions of web users worldwide.
The latest release is "Google Spreadsheets" - currently undergoing a "limited test", this is an online application which allows users to create and amend spreadsheets online, and share the results with other people.
We applied for an invitation to try out the new tool, and received an email within 24 hours, allowing us to try out the software.
The basic online functionality is good - you can create and update spreadsheets with ease, with some, but by no means all, of the editing functionality provided by Microsoft Excel. You can upload spreadsheets from your hard drive (in .xls or .csv format) and save spreadsheets created online either within your Google account or on your own PC. After a while, the editing functions do seem very intuitive, however this is no replacement for Excel.
One function which could prove to be a real winner for Google Spreadsheets is the ability to share spreadsheets with other users. You can "invite" other users to edit or share your work with ease (simply send them an email via the application). This could be particularly useful for small business people who may work at different locations if they need to share accounting or other data.
The application did prove to have mixed success when importing Excel spreadsheets (e.g. not importing percentage signs or dates accurately), and it is limited in its complexity with dealing with certain cell formulae. Additionally, despite our best efforts, it seems impossible to print spreadsheets - there is no neat print function and you have to resort to printing the entire HTML Page rather than selecting neat sections of data for print.
To try out Google Spreadsheets for yourself - click here.
Posted June 14, 2006
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