Google Spreadsheets
On a whim, I signed up with Google Spreadsheets and was extremely surprised to find an invite waiting for me when I got back from my exam (talk about a reward!)
So my early impressions:
- It's like a basic Microsoft Excel, it does everything (as you'll see in the screenshots) from freezing panes to formulae but I haven't found a way to add graphs, write macros etc (which to me is the real strength of Excel)
- The auto-updating/recalculations of cells is very cool - at first I didn't expect it to do it.
- It is however excruciatingly slow - I won't give them too much grief with this point considering this looks like it is in an alpha (or perhaps pre-alpha) stage. As an example, however, a few times it took several seconds for a cell to become highlighted once clicked, sorting also took several seconds. What's even worse is a lot of the time a red updating bar (a la GMail) appears underneath the toolbar which is highly distracting. Also I got a 'connection lost' error a few times but that again is problem just an alpha bug.
- Uploading a spreadsheet from Excel was a piece of cake and it seemed for the most part to import everything correctly
- One feature I do find odd is they have a Merge Across button but you can't seem to vertically merge the cells (only horizontally)...
- I attempted to invite Jesse to play with me but for the moment you can only share the spreadsheet with other invitees - hence I think I haven't seen the selling point of this app.
- It doesn't support Safari but that looks to be the new trend - I mean Vox doesn't support it either ;)
For the moment, however, my thoughts can be summed up by the word 'meh'. It is a decidedly cool web app but as a spreadsheet... From the digg thread many are hoping this is the almighty Excel killer but I'm not really sure. From what I gather of the app and the intro pages, the killer feature here is the ability to share your spreadsheets, as a non-business/enterprise/corporate user, I rarely do this but I could see the use for it.
For now, if I ever need to use a spreadsheet, it'll be Excel - more feature rich, faster and I know where everything is in the app!
