Google Excels (at spreadsheets)
Sep 26, 15:19 by Lorna
Google seems to be the bringer of all good things at the moment, they are rolling out another can’t-live-without-it application every month almost. One that has been around for a few months but which I’m using more and more is Google Spreadsheets.
Most people are familiar with Microsoft Excel (or its equivalent cousin, Open Office Calc) which is used for spreadsheets, for keeping track of numbers or other information which belongs in grid formation and which you might want to add up. Money management and information formatting are common tasks for Excel.
When I started using Google Spreadsheets, I think I was expecting a web page with some JavaScript or something, formatted nicely in those trademark blue colours. What I actually saw was a fully-grown spreadsheet application sitting there in my web-browser1 and winking at me. The features you’d expect are there, you can format fonts, move cells (and rows and columns of cells) around, enter numbers, alter number formats, search, sort, sum and add formulae. The sheer power of this application (and it is an application and not a web page) is impressive.
I should point out that I’m not really a power user of spreadsheets. I use them about as much as the next person – manage sports tournaments or keep information about people in them. Perhaps format a report for work and print it, really that’s about it, I work with databases which means using database tools rather than a spreadsheet. But everything I’ve seen so far takes Google Spreadsheets beyond anything I’d need.
Collaboration is the key
I could almost stop there in terms of my praise for this product, but then the real killer feature of this application would have been skated over as an inconsequence. Google spreadsheets is collaborative.
You can create a spreadsheet and share it with someone else, or a number of people. They can log in and update as and when they want to, if two people are viewing it in real time then both users see each other’s changes right on the screen, exactly as they happen. No file locking, no lost copies of documents because they were copied to local hard drives, no trying to merge sets of changes. Just online, real-time multiple editing.
Where do I sign?
Google Spreadsheets is free, all you need is a Google Account which you can sign up for on the main spreadsheets page. In order to share spreadsheets, the other users will need google accounts too.
1 I found that I needed Internet Explorer to get the spreadsheet to work at all – Opera isn’t supported yet although I’m sure it won’t be far behind.
