Google Spreadsheet and GooOS
Well I got on to the limited testers for Google spreadsheets. I wanted to try it out as I have a few work related logs which I manage that go around with me on a pen drive, and I thought what better than to have a web based solution.
I've been testing it out this morning and so far its more advanced than I thought it would be. The usual functions are there; bold,underline, copy, paste, formulas, multiple worksheet support, and you can even upload(open) you current .xls and .csv files. It also allows you to download all worksheets in a .xls format or download a single sheet in .csv and .html. One other nice feature which I think Excel doesnt have is autosave!
Obviously you cannot use macros but this isnt too much of a worry for me as im a basic Excel user. Overall its a good complete (free) spreadsheet editor which also happens to be online, but this does come at a cost. The system seems sluggish which is probably the amout of Ajax they have running in the background with the amount of onscreen information. You also cannot reduce the font which proves annoying when you have a 15+ row sheet even on my 21" 1680x1050 monitor. It is possible to reduce the font using the browser but then you loose the text on the editor button so this doesnt really work but you can of course send Google feedback and suggestions.
Looking at it though does remind me of the GooOS posts back in 2004 especially as they have now acquired Writely (an online word processor) recently.
Overall for now I'm sticking to Excel and my pen drive and thats not because its a terrible service, having everything online is nice, and it will be the future, but if you need a document and your web connection is down, what you gonna do?
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I think the major benefit with this OLA (online application) comes when you working with others on the same spreadsheet. I tested it this morning using IE and FireFox via 2 separate Google accounts and it worked a treat, changing the data in one browser change the data in the other in real-time. You can also chat via the browsers similar to how you can in Gmail - neither i don't think are possible with say MSoffice/openoffice etc. I think that we shouldn't think about it as an alternative for 'excel' as such but an collaborative real-time spreadsheet editor.
As for the website being down... hmmm what if you have a flat battery on your laptop fro example, you then couldn't do any work, but with an online app - well you can just hop on any computer and away you go...
On a side note did you get my email with the screengrab of how your site renders
in Safari?
cheers, Joc
im so all over google spreadsheets for application project management and managing my scope of work docs there... you can make someone READ-only, or write... WOW!
great for collabo!
btw... first time i have found your blog, and i must say, great implementation of blogcfc and green/black with a classy look!
tough to pull off! cheers
@Joc, I got your email for somereason I've had no time to look into it. Plus i really wanna update to BlogCFC 5 so i'll do it with that. Do you mind holding on :o)
@Tony, cheers for the comment much appreciated!
@Segu, Zohosheet looks nice actually and for features it definately got them. The thing is that like an office app you'll want to do everything with one tool and i cant see why Google aren't gonna go down the Word processing route. Thats gonna be Zohosheets downfall.