Google Spreadsheets

[Lazybones]

http://www.google.com/googlespreadsheets/thanks.html


Coming soon...

Google making a move into the office space? First they purchase an online word processor, now they have a spreadsheet?  Hmm they seem to be missing an presentation program, as they already have email and calendar functions.

Although none of their current offerings are a good replacement for MS Office at this point.

[Mr. Analog]

Actually the Google Office move has been anticipated for a little while, if you recall last year they teamed up with Sun (who produce Sun Office a popular MS Office alternative) and much speculation abounded, so with the success of other tools like that calendar and of course GMail it's sort of interesting to see Google's market pattern sort of be the reverse of Microsoft, that is to say they start with a search engine, move to an online mail provider, team up with Sun to make an office suite and well, who knows? Maybe one day there will be a flavour of Linux or Solaris that Google rolls out eh?

Either way, I'm interested to see what they do UI-wise with spreadsheets.

[Lazybones]

Only problem I see with hosted applications is uptime.. Net connections are not that reliable, even when you have service level agreements.

For a home users they could be very handy, however, think about a student using this as their office suite and not being able to complete an report because their net connection went down.

On the flip side as a student, being able to edit and save anywhere in the same app, with any net connection could be very attractive.

Now, will it render on my PDA

[Lazybones]

Well I applyed and was accepted..

Not much there for functions.. Just a very basic spread sheet.. Seems that most of your standard keyboard shortcuts are there, which is good since you can't right click.

Rather slow when you compare it to ANY desktop app.

[Lazybones]

Some images and video of features.

http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-06-06-n86.html

[Darren Dirt]

Hey Lazy, your linking to the 2 "demo" videos got me intrigued enough to request a preview signup.

Got the email about 20 minutes ago, in the following screenshot it's a summary "review" in my opinion -- the green/blue cells are my "thumbs up" comments, and the yellow/orange/red coloured cells are my complaints/criticisms.

OVERALL, though, I'm impressed with how FAST it is (aside from the resizing of columns/rows -- and it's a pain in the ass to find the exact place to trigger the resizing!) and among the features I think they should add, many of them should be very easy to implement, considering.

[Adams]

Will it have formula support...? I have not read anything that says it will.

[Darren Dirt]

Tab # 3 is "Formula" and in my example above, the last column is a "isEven()" formula -- but there's like 100 or more formula listed in the choices so that definitely was impressive.

I presume that's what you meant (things like Average, Sum, If(), etc.) -- or did you mean macros?

[Adams]

Just formulas, macros are a nice to have but if they want to be an alternative or even a help to people who use excel they should open an excel document then save to an excel document or it will be just a nice little program.

[Darren Dirt]

Just formulas, macros are a nice to have but if they want to be an alternative or even a help to people who use excel they should open an excel document then save to an excel document or it will be just a nice little program.

I clicked "Formula" - "More..." and did a copy to the clipboard.

A bit of text manipulation, voila! Looks like there are 232 Functions available (!)



Functions in category "Math":
ABS, ACOS, ACOSH, ASIN, ASINH, ATAN, ATAN2, ATANH, CEILING, COMBIN, COS, COSH, COUNT, COUNTA, COUNTBLANK, COUNTIF, DEGREES, EVEN, EXP, FACT, FACTDOUBLE, FLOOR, GCD, INT, LCM, LN, LOG, LOG10, MDETERM, MINVERSE, MMULT, MOD, MROUND, MULTINOMIAL, ODD, PI, POWER, PRODUCT, QUOTIENT, RADIANS, RAND, RANDBETWEEN, ROUND, ROUNDDOWN, ROUNDUP, SERIESSUM, SIGN, SIN, SINH, SQRT, SQRTPI, SUM, SUMIF, SUMPRODUCT, SUMSQ, SUMX2MY2, SUMX2PY2, SUMXMY2, TAN, TANH, TRUNC



Functions in category "Financial":
ACCRINT, ACCRINTM, COUPDAYBS, COUPDAYS, COUPDAYSNC, COUPNCD, COUPNUM, COUPPCD, CUMIPMT, CUMPRINC, DB, DDB, DISC, DOLLARDE, DOLLARFR, DURATION, EFFECT, FV, FVSCHEDULE, IPMT, IRR, MDURATION, MIRR, NOMINAL, NPER, NPV, PMT, PPMT, PRICE, PRICEDISC, PRICEMAT, PV, RATE, RECEIVED, SLN, SYD, TBILLEQ, TBILLPRICE, TBILLYIELD, XIRR, XNPV, YIELD, YIELDDISC, YIELDDISC



Functions in category "Logical":
AND, IF, NOT, OR



Functions in category "Date":
DATE, DATEVALUE, DAY, DAYS360, EDATE, EOMONTH, MONTH, NETWORKDAYS, TODAY, WEEKDAY, WORKDAY, YEAR, YEARFRAC



Functions in category "Lookup":
ADDRESS, CHOOSE, COLUMN, COLUMNS, HLOOKUP, INDIRECT, OFFSET, ROW, ROWS, TRANSPOSE, VLOOKUP



Functions in category "Statistical":
AVEDEV, AVERAGE, AVERAGEA, BINOMDIST, CONFIDENCE, CORREL, COVAR, CRITBINOM, DEVSQ, EXPONDIST, FISHER, FISHERINV, FORECAST, FREQUENCY, GEOMEAN, GROWTH, HARMEAN, HYPGEOMDIST, INTERCEPT, KURT, LARGE, LINEST, LOGEST, LOGINV, LOGNORMDIST, MAX, MAXA, MEDIAN, MIN, MINA, MODE, NEGBINOMDIST, NORMDIST, NORMINV, NORMSDIST, NORMSINV, PEARSON, PERCENTILE, PERCENTRANK, PERMUT, POISSON, PROB, QUARTILE, RANK, RSQ, SKEW, SLOPE, SMALL, STANDARDIZE, STDEV, STDEVA, STDEVP, STDEVPA, STEYX, TREND, TRIMMEAN, VAR, VARA, VARP, VARPA, WEIBULL, ZTEST



Functions in category "Text":
CHAR, CODE, CONCATENATE, DOLLAR, EXACT, FIND, FIXED, LEFT, LEN, LOWER, MATCH, MID, PROPER, REPLACE, REPT, RIGHT, SEARCH, SUBSTITUTE, T, TEXT, TRIM, UPPER, VALUE



Functions in category "Info":
ERRORTYPE, ISBLANK, ISERR, ISERROR, ISEVEN, ISLOGICAL, ISNA, ISNONTEXT, ISNUMBER, ISODD, ISREF, ISTEXT, N, NA



- - -

That enough "formula" functionality for ya?

[Adams]

Oh yea, thats pretty good. I just got into beta so I was playing with it. It can open and close excel spread sheets.

[Darren Dirt]

http://www.google.com/googlespreadsheets/thanks.html


Coming soon...

Google making a move into the office space? First they purchase an online word processor, now they have a spreadsheet?

Woot, there it is.

They're starting to actually market towards small businesses.

Google has deployed the first pieces of its upcoming Office suite. They've launched Google Apps for your Domain, a set of Google services targeted to small and mid sized companies. With the new service, companies can use Gmail, Talk, Calendar and Page Creator under a single control panel. Applications and data will be hosted by Google, for free, with ad support.

And that's just the first move. According to Aaron Ricadela at InformationWeek, Google will soon add their Writely and Spreadsheet products to the suite, add collaboration tools that will work across platforms, and even provide technical support.

And when Gmail users send office documents, Google will prompt them to open the documents in Google's new suite, allowing for collaboration and, presumably, making money from advertising.

This is a bold move by Google. They are striking hard at a nearly $12 billion/year Microsoft revenue stream. And they are clearly trying to get this out the door fast, in anticipation of Microsoft Office 2007, which will include collaboration features for businesses (as does Office Live, announced last year).

Also the article above mentions Zoho: http://www.zoho.com/
Notice how many of their apps are "100% free" (Most of their demo apps are actualy rather slow, but their "ZohoCreator" looks pretty intriguing -- like the simplicity of Access (think Wizards and templates), applied to web applications of pretty much any genre!)


(see also that other thread: http://forums.righteouswrath.com/index.php/topic,2602.0.html )


- - -

Of course, not everyone thinks this is good, or even significant news...
- http://software.gigaom.com/2006/08/27/google-apps-for-your-domain#comments
- http://software.gigaom.com/2006/08/27/web-office-vs-microsoft-office/#comments

Jason Fried, one of the co-founders of 37Signals offers a more coherent and more balanced answer, when he tells RH, ?The modern office is more about real-time collaboration and group chat, and not just a spreadsheet and processor.? I agree - Web Office should not be about replacing the old, but inventing the new web apps that solve some specific problems.

Good point.

And now a word from the voice of business:

...corporate America is not going to embrace online applications and storage for a long time- privacy, security, fear of a bad decision, and confidentiality requirements ensure that. But the more individuals and small businesses that opt for Google's free alternatives, the bigger Google's toehold is- both in the office productivity space and in connection with its master plan to be the keeper of all of our data.

:-\

Dozens of companies are coming out with possible "MSOffice-killers": e.g. nice comparison grid , too bad this one doesn't offer an easy to see demo...