Google Spreadsheets, Microsoft excel killer
Google already had aquired Writely earlier the online word processing service, now they have come up with another one service Google Spreadsheet in Google labs which can be used to process spreadsheets online.
This is potentially the Microsofy Office suite killer, with Microsoft launching their Office 2007 beta for public testing, Google has come up with another one which unlike Microsoft's product is spelt as FREE.
What you can do with Google Spreadsheets?
Well you can do all the things which you can do in a spreadsheet program, including number formatting, sorting by colums, and adding forumlas.
In addition you can also upload your current spreadsheets to Google spreadsheets in ls or csv format, all your forumlas and formatting will be uploaded intact without and changes.
The look and feel of the Google Desktop is similar to that of a Desktop application and you can use it to format your text to bold, underline, italic, change the cell format, add background colours etc.
Sharing your spreadsheets.
You can also share your spreadsheets online, sharing is easy and you just enter the email address of the people you want to share a given spreadsheet with and then send them a message. People with whom you share a given spreadsheet can access it as soon as they sign in.
Multiple people can also edit the spreadsheet at the same time and you will see their names in the on-screen chat windows.
Storing your spreadsheets.
As with Writely, Google Spreadsheets also does not require you to download any softwares and you can safely store your spreadsheets online and access it from any computer with an internet connection.
The spreadsheet's also has a auto save feature just like most of Google's other services.
You can also download the files in CSV, XLS and HTML formats.
Signing up for spreadsheets is currently by invitation only, but Google is going to announce a formal public beta launch somewhere this week.
Currently supported browsers are IE 6 (Windows) and FireFox 1.07+ (Windows, Mac, Linux)
You can register your email to get a invite to Google Spreadsheets .
Adam
June 6th, 2006 at 8:06 pm #
Spreadsheets are normally just a way to present the data or possible a quick and cheap tool to do some analysis. For the die-hard use of a data tool you are far better off using some kind of data base to do the heavy lifting. You can connect EXCEL to ACCESS for instance and have EXCEL just create graphs, pivot tables etc, with the data residing in the ACCESS dbase instead of in the restricted spreadsheet (65K lines). A web based spreadsheet may have its uses, but they are limited by the limitations of EXCEL itself.
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