The Spreadsheet Buzz
There’s already a multitude of reviews, both good and bad, about Google Spreadsheets (Techcrunch, rev2.org, Solution Watch). And, there’s even a screencast at sitening for those of you not lucky enough to get in on an invitation.
Instead of doing an extensive review, which many of the other bloggers have already done, I’ll just give some of the highlights and first impressions.
Pros
- Fast and instant access anywhere (what we’ve come to expect from Google)
- Ability to share and chat on the spreadsheet with other users
- Excel users will be very comfortable with the interface (maybe, even a little too comfortable)
- Nice file exporting and saving features
Cons
- No search, as Techcrunch pointed out (although, we wouldn’t be banging on this issue if it were another company, like Microsoft)
- No advanced features like graphs, which may be a deal killer for a lot of people
- Lack of right click context menus, which is a difficult problem to deal with in a web application
In the end, the question is, will people actually use it? Or will it go the way of many of Google’s other applications, which seem to be merely experimental. There are other spreadsheet apps that are more feature complete than Google’s, including Numbler and NumSum.
The advantage that Google Spreadsheets has is the potential integration with other Google services, like Gmail, Writely, or whatever other web app it decides to deploy next (online Visio and Project anyone?) The collaboration aspect to Spreadsheets is quite clean, and if they could emphasize and extend the ease of sharing across apps and with many people, it could be very useful.
Again, before any company would jump to using this app, there’s still the privacy and security aspect. Would you be comfortable holding all your important (and potentially classified) spreadsheets on Google’s servers? I think the answer for most companies is a very simple “no.”
