Necessary Roughness

I took a first look at Google Spreadsheet this afternoon to see if it was something my wife and I could use to keep a spreadsheet updated while I am on the road. If you have a Google account, you can just go to docs.google.com, type in your first and last name, and get to work.

It’s close enough to Excel to annoy the Excel connoisseur. While I could rename sheets and cut and paste pretty securely, one has to be careful when using formulas. I had a SUM formula that totaled 6 rows. When I inserted a seventh, I expected the SUM formula to expand to include the added row, and that didn’t happen.

Fonts, sizes, and colors are supported. One can’t use a “Header 1″ font setting like you can in Excel. Columns do not automatically spill over when you type too much for a cell. Cells can be highlighted and merged. Resizing columns is similar to Excel. One has to double-click on a cell to edit it; single-clicking twice will just select the cell again. Menus do not go away when you click on them a second time; one has to click outside the menu or choose a command to close it.

CTRL-X (cut) or CTRL-C (copy) on a range produces a red box around the area to be cut that goes away. Excel would continue to show what was being cut or copied. Copying a formula from one column to another behaves appropriately, altering the columns in the formula. There is no Paste Format function, but if you copy text that is bold to another cell, the destination is bold too.

Sorting seems limited; one can only sortan entire column rather than just selecting a range. Header rows can be frozen.

I do not see any charting functions like in Excel, but I suppose when we get to that point we can export. The Export options look pretty cool: one can import CSV, HTML, ODS (OpenDocument spreadsheet), PDF, and Excel. XLS, ODS, and CSV are supported in Import.

Changes are automatically saved upon every change, which is cool. I was able to assign the Mrs. as a “collaborator” so that she can edit the spreadsheet as well. There is a Discuss option that is similar to Instant Messenging, only the chat stays with the document.

I used Firefox 2.0 for all tests, and I didn’t get any scripting errors. That’s pretty impressive.

At first glance this looks like something young but usable for basic tasks. The response is good on a broadband connection, but I don’t know how fast it is on dialup. I would really like to see the formulas update properly when data rows change, but everything else I could get used to. Google recently purchased Writely online writing software and added it as Google Docs, and there are plans for future integration. This should be interesting.