Google introduces new spreadsheet today - - thoughts...

[Tom Urtis]

Today Google will introduce a new spreadsheet program...here is a link:
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/060605/google_spreadsheet.html?.v=3

That Google is backing the venture means the product has financial legs, and although it is not meant to be just like Excel, Google is doing this because they think they can grab spreadsheet market share from Microsoft.

One thing that strikes me is, most Excel users only know about or tap into roughly 10% of Excel's capabilities, if that, meaning they "over-buy" when purchasing Excel. If users only want or need certain basic features, this Google spreadsheet program might turn out to satisfy enough people to become a stable permanent product. Excel will probably always be the superior spreadsheet program but I'm sure Google's product introduction has gotten the attention of Redmond's Excel sales forecasters.

Interested to see anyone's thoughts about the evolving spreadsheet market, which is getting increasingly web-based, and interesting thanks to competition.

 

[Von Pookie]

...aaaaaand now clicking the link in my email let me in. Straight to the spreadsheet. Go figure.

 

[Richard Schollar]

Is this a MrExcel MVP-only discussion, or can anyone jump in?

I guess this is an Ajax application?

Useful if you need a spreadie on the move (ie whilst not at your home PC) but Excel or Open Office is difficult to beat at the moment IMHO...

Richard

 

[Tom Urtis]

For people who cannot or don't want to get a downloaded copy, this link has a couple videos and other links with screen shots and discussion:

http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-06-06-n86.html

Microsoft won't lose market share represented by people like us who use Excel for business and proprietary data management. But, there is definitely a market niche of users who only need basic nuts and bolts spreadsheet features and for them, Google's product will probably be well received. The Google product as we see it today will certainly evolve tomorow, as Google gains market traction while working out the bugs and addressing "wish list complaints" sure to come from their release today.

One thing's for sure, we live in an interesting time of spreadsheet software program development that is becoming increasingly web-integrated.

 

[NateO]

Hello again, nope, anyone can post here.

For people who cannot or don't want to get a downloaded copy, this link has a couple videos and other links with screen shots and discussion:
{snip}

Just to be sure, there is no download, this is entirely housed on their server, and is entirely web-based. Theoretically, all you need is browser. But, I would guess they've locked down users by now, I must have been one of the first people to request access...

It seems to be working okay with IE*, and perhaps, eventually, with FireFox, but Kristy was struggling with the latter, yesterday.

Why the asterix? Because 9/10 questions that get asked on these forums won't work on this offering, at least not yet, really, in fact 9/10 might be conservative... But, then again, this is pre-Beta.

Advanced, native functionality is gone, VBA, Text-to-Columns, Conditional Formatting, non-factor. Perhaps to be expected...

It looks like 100 rows and T columns isn't the max. I read somewhere that as of right now it's 10,000 rows and 256 columns, and we can expect that to grow with time. It appears that the Application has built-in logic to minimize the columns and rows on new and existing workbooks, that can be expanded by inserting rows and columns, which is kind of slow; I didn't spend much time doing this...

Even for 'nuts and bolts' there's a few surprising things missing that I might think this will need to be viable (my opinion). No custom cell borders. Data formats are too limited, e.g., 24 hour clock for times, only. No function documentation at all, I'm working off my Excel knowledge and help files to test this thing!

Here's the big one: It doesn't seem to support array-entered functions, as of now. I did a quick and dirty {Sum(If())} test, no dice. A Spreadsheet that can't handle arrays/matrix math doesn't work for me... Easily one of the most powerful features Excel has to offer, in my estimation.

You can't step through your functions with F9, either, so the parsing is mysterious at this point. Along the same lines, Sumproduct() isn't working as expected for conditional computing, slightly advanced use, the return is wrong. What's really odd is that the following function:

=SUMPRODUCT((B1:B3=1)*(C1:C3))

When entered into A2 returns 0,which is wrong. And, if I enter the same function in A3, it returns 1, while the correct answer should be 2. Not sure what's going on... And speaking of Sumproduct(), G-Spreadsheet does support implicit type coercion (e.g., String->Double), but be careful how you do it! The double unary minus (e.g., --x) is not supported, that generates a parsing error, while X+0 is supported. A single unary minus is supported, so I'm not sure where the parser is breaking down...

Here's what does work really well, Shared Mode. The updates are pretty much real time, although it is easy to overwrite others work, as I found yesterday. Still, changes come quickly and the chat functionality is slick and effective with IE.

Cool product. Has a ways to go before it's viable, in my opinion, or for my use, but a nice start to what might very well might be a slick utility.

If anyone wants me to check out anything specific, let me know in this thread.

 

[Domski]

Anyone else got an invite for this yet?

I requested mine a few days ago and not heard anything. Thought already having a google mail etc account might give priority but no such luck

 

[Von Pookie]

I signed up for an invite Tuesday morning but received the actual invite later that afternoon after I already had access to Nate's sheet.

It's simply first come/first serve, though. No preference for already having an account. Besides, it's currently in limited testing. They could simply be waiting to see how this load goes before they invite more people.

 

[Richard Schollar]

Dom

I signed up on Tuesday or Wednesday and have yet to hear anything. I think at this stage, whilst my curiosity is certainly piqued, Nate's doing a good job of relaying the available functionality so I can probably live without directly seeing it myself.

Richard

 

[NateO]

Hello again!

I think at this stage, whilst my curiosity is certainly piqued, Nate's doing a good job of relaying the available functionality so I can probably live without directly seeing it myself.

Sounds like you're enjoying the feedback, so here are a few more tests. It does seem to support some arrays, the following works just fine, as it does in Excel:

=SUM({1,2,3})

So, from here I thought I would try to test a Lookup() function, but curiously, Lookup() is not supported (see Range A2, below), so the following bombs:

=LOOKUP(2,{1,2,3;10,20,30})

Pity... But VLookup() does appear to be supported, so I tried the following:

=VLOOKUP(2,{1,10;2,20;3,30},2,FALSE)

But, this didn't work either... Excel's VLookup() actually wants an array, which it will coerce a Range Object into. This does not appear to be the case with G-Spreadsheet's VLookup() algorithm, it demands a Range Object, as you can see in this screen-shot:

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So, it's either working directly on a Range Object, which I would suspect is slow ( ), or the algorithm's argument is Strongly Typed, which might be a bit of a pity... Excel functions all work on arrays, it seems, I suspect G-Spreadsheet should be doing the same, for the sake of performance, as it seems that their version of Sum() does...

And for the finale of this post, don't even bother trying to work with this App, offline, for now, check out the following error IE generates if you attempt this:
<center>

</center>

Erm... Which setting was that, again?!

This is pretty annoying as it's persistent, in that you click 'OK', then it gets generated again, and again, and again, and so on...

I know the point is to collaborate and house all of this on-line, but it might be nice if you could go offline and work your spreadsheet!

Well, that's all of the testing for now... More to come.

 

[Domski]

Hi,

Got two invites in the end, both to my Google e-mail account but when I clicked on the link it informed me that I didn't have a Google account and to register for another one. Quite strange.

Eventually managed to get in via a lot of random clicking on links and hoping for the best.

Seems to work pretty well although I spent most of the weekend consuming beer and watching the World Cup.

Will have to spend a bit more time on it when I can although I agree, Nate's doing a fine job.

 

[Von Pookie]

I ran across a write-up this morning:

Hands on: Google Spreadsheets is more powerful than you think
It's no Excel killer, but Google's online spreadsheet will surprise you with what it can do

(Link is to "printable" version)
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&articleId=9001087