Google Spreadsheets Reviewed
My love affair with Google continues. I just got access to Google Spreadsheets and let me tell you, it’s pretty cool! As per my previous post, I don’t think that MS Office is on it’s way out, by any means but the features that Google Spreadsheets offers are very impressive for an AJAX app. For example, selecting mulitple rows and resizing one resizes all rows equally. Also, many functions are available to help most calculations that would be performed day in and day out.
There are a few features that were left out for obvious reasons. For example if you were looking to integrate a spreadsheet with your Word Document, your out of luck since Google only offers spreadsheets. But I was disappointed that two features that I often use in Excel are not in Google Spreadsheets: graphing abillities and autofill. While I can understand that graphing would require quite a bit of extra code, I can’t tell you how many times I use the autofill function. Perhaps these are features that Google will introduce at a later date.
One feature that I did enjoy that is easier to use in Google Spreadsheets than MS Excel is the abillity to collaborate on documents with your friends and colleagues. Moreover, when multiple users log in at the same time to view a document, any changes made by user 1 are seen in realtime by user 2. There is even a builtin chat feature (who would’ve guessed?) that allows users to IM each other about the document. This is VERY SLICK.
For now, Google Spreadsheets is a sold app that can be used in absence of Excel or any other full blown spreadsheet application. However, as I noted there are a few missing features that can make spreadsheet life a bit more difficult. In the current version, I give Google an “A” for effort, but I give the entire product a 3.5 out of 5.
Technorati Tags: Google Spreadsheets, Google Spreadsheets review, AJAX, collaboration
September 8th, 2006 at 10:39 am
I’m writing about webapplications on my blog. Just wanted to let you know that Google has added some new features to their Google Spreadsheets application. See my blog for more details.