beta @ amanzi

As reported yesterday, Google released the first beta of their spreadsheets application with the inspired name of Google Spreadsheets (I’m going to refer to it as Gsheets for the purpose of this review.) The beta is only available to a limited amount of testers as the product really is in the early stages.

The interface itself looks impressive and clicking around the cells and on the menus seems responsive enough. As far as features goes, Gsheets has focused on getting the basics done well with good formatting options and lots of functions.

The most obvious feature missing at the moment is the ability to create charts but I’m sure this won’t be too far off. To take a closer look at the features I created a basic spreadsheet to test the waters.

This is just a basic income/expense spreadsheet and it highlights some of the functionality of Gsheets. You can use the usual keyboard shortcuts to copy (ctrl + c), cut (ctrl + x), and paste (ctrl + v), along with formatting shortcuts like bold (ctrl +b), italics (ctrl + i), and underline (ctrl + u). Edit (F2) and undo (ctrl + z) also work as expected.

Obviously the most useful addition to this spreadsheet would be a chart but this feature is not available yet. Another feature that’s missing which lots of people find essential is the ability to draw borders around cells. I was also unable to auto fill the contents of the month column by dragging the corner of the cell like I can in Excel or other spreadsheets. Apart from that, you can see that creating a basic spreadsheet is rather straightforward.

Now to really test out Gsheets I imported a complex spreadsheet downloaded from the Microsoft Office Templates site. Now first, I have to give props to Microsoft for releasing this and I recommend you download it too (link below.) It’s a complete timetable and score tracker for the 2006 World Cup Finals. The spreadsheet is full of complex formulas and calculations occur over several different sheets. This is what the spreadsheet looks like in Excel and in Gsheets.

Gsheets imported just about everything correctly apart from some of the colours (there are only web-safe colours available at the moment) and the image at the top of the file. I also took the liberty of filling in some fictitious scores for the first round in Group A. The calculations automatically update the league standings as you type them in and the complex formulas work the same in both Excel and Gsheets.

This is pretty impressive and shows that Gsheets (is the name catching on yet?) is definitely a powerful application. But the most useful features come in to play when you combine Gsheets with Gmail and Gtalk. You can share spreadsheets with other users and chat to them in real time while they view and update the spreadsheet collaboratively. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to test the sharing functionality properly, but interestingly I was able to invite myself to edit the document and could chat to myself from different windows… (not as fun as it sounds!)

Overall my impression of Google Spreadsheets is that for a (very) beta product it is highly functional and it works exceptionally well. The collaboration features could be a real winner but not until more users can access the spreadsheets, and not until people realise that emailing spreadsheets for review isn’t that productive. A potential use would be to include an “open with Gsheets� link if you receive a spreadsheet in your Gmail. But this is not a competitor to Microsoft’s Excel and probably won’t be for the foreseeable future. This will definitely come in handy for it’s collaboration features and for those times when you don’t have a full copy of Excel (or any of the other desktop spreadsheet applications.)

Links

• Google Spreadsheets
• Microsoft Office Excel World Cup 2006 template

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