office is dead? #1: Google Spreadsheets

Posted on | June 24, 2006 | 2 Comments

‘(Microsoft) Office is dead!’ – that seems to be the mantra of many web 2.0-apps. but can current web-office-applications really substitute an office-suite with a decades-long history of improvement and extension? over the next weeks, I’m going to review several popular web-apps to see if that’s the case, starting with Google Spreadsheets, which recently was introduced by Google Labs. while Spreadsheets is currently not actively marketed as a product, I bet Google plans tight integration into GMail, similar to recent acquisition Writely.

usability & featureset

basic editing-functions and many keyboard-shortcuts for entering data into the sheet are comfortably similar to Microsoft Excel. the product currently offers only very basic format-options like a few fonts, text- & background-color and text-alignment. more complex layouts are prevented by the lack of features like setting the border-color. Spreadsheet supports loads of mathematical and statistical functions, but misses to integrate contextual help on how they are used (i.e. Spreadsheets doesn’t display each functions arguments).

Google obviously advocates the paper-less office, since Spreadsheets doesn’t offer a print-function. trying to export to HTML and use the browsers built-in printing isn’t an option either, since the original column-widths are not reassembeld correctly. besides HTML, Spreadsheets exports also to .CSV- and Excel-files.
on an average Windows-PC, Google Spreadsheets is feeling quite responsive. supported browsers include Internet Explorer 6.0+, Firefox 1.0.7+ and Netscape 7.2+ – Safari is currently not supported.

import of excel-sheets

while many layout-formats are not imported correctly (f.e. basic things as cells spanning serveral rows or columns), Spreadsheet handles formulas and functions sufficiently, as well as regional differences regarding date-format and decimal point. graphs of any sort are not imported at all, special characters are lost in translation. in its current state, Spreadsheet does a good job importing excel-files mainly containing pure data, but fails miserably when it comes to adapting even basic formatting & layout.

collaborative features

spreadsheets can be shared (read-only or writeable) with other users simply by sending them invitations via email (all collaborators are required to have GMail-accounts though). what’s really cool is the ability for users to synchronously edit the same sheet. data entered by a contributor just pops up on the screen of each user currently working on the same sheet. an additional chat-sidebar allows live-communication between the collaborators. while the latency is quite low (about one second), I would appreciate if the changes each user made would be represented in different colors.

it’s important to note that Google Spreadsheet is not a finished product, not even feature-complete as a ‘beta’ normally would be. however, the user-interface looks very promising and the possibility of realtime-collaborative editing gives Spreadsheets a fresh twist. users of GMail will probably see the integration of Spreadsheets into the mail-application as an instant file-viewer sooner or later. until that happens, I recommend everyone interested in the state of AJAX-based webapps to try it out!

 

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