Simon’s Blog

I’ve spent a few minutes today trying out the new Google Spreadsheets system. Seems to import simple Excel multi-worksheet spreadsheets well. The system pretty much does what it says on the tin, and works as you’d expect a simple spreadsheet program to work. It’s not even close to being an Excel competitor yet though. The user interface is pretty good - it’s rather better than the Google Calendar interface which, while good for a web browser app, can be a bit awkward to use.

Overall, I like what Google has done here. They’ve added some collaboration features - which allow people to share viewing and editing of spreadsheets with others. This might turn out to be a smart move, if people find these features useful… and they might well. After all, people often share spreadsheets - Google Spreadsheets make this easy.

Overall the system is good enough that I’ll start to use it for simple spreadsheets that I need to access from anywhere. I’m currently using MS Office with documents stored in the Cloud via WebDAV - however, that’s not quite as seamless as it could be, which is why I’m willing to give Google Spreadsheets a go.

For me, then, the main benefit of Google Spreadsheets over other spreadsheet software (MS Office, OpenOffice etc.) is the completely seamless saving of data in the Cloud… which, to be honest, is where it makes sense for most data to be.