Google Spreadsheets

In a post last week, I used a Google spreadsheet for the first time.  The application was relatively trivial and I haven’t seen any user feedback yet so this was much less than an exhaustive test.  Conclusions: 1) probably the wave of the future; 2) that particular future’s not here yet although it may well begin with spreadsheets used in blogs.

For those readers who don’t follow Web 2.0 developments with bated breath, Google spreadsheets differ from Microsoft’s Excel in two important ways: Google spreadsheets are free and you have to be online with a decent connection to use them.  For some people it is also important that the spreadsheet and everything you’ve entered into it lives somewhere in the Google cloud and not on any particular PC.

Since the spreadsheet is online, you can call it up and work on it from whatever Internet café you’ve drifted into or from either your home or work computer.  Because my laptop is permanently welded to the end of my arm and hotspots are replacing Internet cafes in my life, the available-on-any-computer aspect isn’t particularly important.  It is a negative that I can’t see or work on the spreadsheet while I’m unconnected (as I am on a plane now).

Most Fractals of Change readers probably have Excel so it doesn’t mean much to them that they can see my Google spreadsheet without buying any software.  However, if free online spreadsheets get a foothold, it may be that some people will consider NOT buying Excel for their next computer.  Microsoft has made this a stretch because you don’t really buy Excel as a single product, you buy Office.  If you don’t buy Office, you don’t buy Word or PowerPoint either.  Big step but it could happen as online software gets better and connectivity gets more pervasive. At the end of this post is a list of things online spreadsheets could do to distinguish themselves disruptively from their online competitors.

The Google spreadsheet was NOT hard to use for my easy application.  It pretty much acted like Excel with the exception of menu locations.  I had no problem putting formulae in cells or formatting cells as I wanted them to appear.  The pause for recalculation back at the host took a little getting used to since normally such a small spreadsheet would have recalculated almost instantly.  This is probably really a pause for communication rather than calculation.  I wasn’t on a particularly robust connection.  It’s also possible that calculation of a large complex spreadsheet would happen faster than I’m used to on Google’s massive servers.

It was not obvious how to fill down or across.  There were no meaningful matches in Help for “fill”.  However, a search in the user forum immediately told me that “control d” and “control r” fill down and to the right.

The autosave capability seems to save every cell change to the servers in the sky.  This is probably necessary in a world where connections are still tenuous but doesn’t let me decide when I want to checkpoint a sequence of changes.  Need to create a copy with a new name if I want save where I am now and go forward with changes I may or may not want to keep.

Exporting even this trivial spreadsheet to Excel format did not work well at all.  The only cells with significant formulae in them simply exported as errors.  Formatting was all screwed up.  You can’t unseat the leader without providing transition tools.  This flaw makes me wonder how serious Google is about challenging Microsoft.

In order to use the Google spreadsheet I posted, users need to have a Google account and need to especially enable it for use with Google spreadsheets.  I’d be interested in comments on how much of an obstacle to use this is.

The copy of the spreadsheet users get access to is read-only, otherwise changes by any user would change it for all (wikisheet?).  The whole point of this particular spreadsheet is to make it possible for users to calculate their own savings should they decide to install better windows (in their houses, not on their machines).  User input to the spreadsheet is obviously important.  What users have to do is make their own copies which are open for change, then put in their own parameters.  This process isn’t too hard but it would have been better if I could have somehow specified that each user got his her own copy from the getgo.

One of the goals of online spreadsheet is to make remote collaboration easier.  Instead of designating my spreadsheet available to all users, I could have specified that only certain users (as registered with Google) would have access to it.  Not perfect security but probably adequate for most applications – particularly since the URLs for spreadsheet names are not easy to guess - http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=purFrSPR3VC_TCPOcX-rZXA is the name of the one I made.  Not something you’d stumble upon by accident.

BEFORE Google (or other) online spreadsheets seriously challenge King Excel, import and export from and to the current and last three versions of Excel need to be flawless and the Excel option packs all need to be available – preferably also free.  There is a huge investment in existing Excel spreadsheet which users need to protect before changing platforms.

Here are some of the features I think could make online spreadsheets a compelling choice over their offline counterparts.

1.      a robust and growing library of user-contributed functions and add-ins which is easily searchable.

2.      a robust and growing library of online data which can be easily be incorporated by reference into a spreadsheet.

3.      a robust and growing library of user-contributed templates.

4.      strong collaboration tools with versioning and cell-by-cell control of who can modify and see what.

5.      read-only access to spreadsheets without the need for registration of any kind.

6.      good tools for embedding actual live spreadsheets into html pages – especially blogs – so that the reader can interact directly with a spreadsheet within another document without having to open a separate window.

7.      Lightening fast calculation of large complex spreadsheets on number-crunching servers in the sky.

Just being free isn’t enough.  Online spreadsheets will be revolutionary when they support things that CAN’T be done practically offline.