CodeFrenzy

So Google are now moving on into the spreadsheet business? This week Google released yet another product – Google Spreadsheets – an online spreadsheet application. Having just had a quick play around with it, it really is quite cool. Random, but cool. The functionality available is impressive – you can save spreadsheets, open ones already saved, download it as an .xls or .csv, and you can even share your spreadsheets with other users.

For the sheet itself, you can click in individual cells or highlight a group of them, type stuff into them, press F2 to edit existing text in a cell (just as you do in Excel), format the text (font, color and type of cell e.g. decimal, dollar, plain text…). You can even include formulas in the cells…

So how is all this done? Well, using a hell of a lot of javascript and some css. I can only assume that the speadsheet might use up a fair bit of RAM on the client-side (if my laptop didn’t have 1.5 gig RAM I might be able to notice…). I wonder well it works on different browsers. I might have to try it out on that mac at work tomorrow. Safari seems to be pretty good at breaking all sites that use css.

Anyway, I guess something like this new product might be used by those who don’t already own Excel and refuse to pay for it, or those who don’t have it installed but do have a nice connection to the internet and need to quickly whip up a spreadsheet… Hmm, who knows.

Below are a couple of screenshots for those who havn’t seen it yet.

Time seems to be flying. It’s certainly been an interesting year so far. Lets see, so far this year, I have…

1) been to South America and back,
2) been interviewed extensively for a SE job at Google (unfortunately unsuccessful – guess I really don’t know how to move mount fuji),
3) resurrected an old (1985) Honda Civic from almost ending up at the junk yard (with Pete’s help),
4) got my scooter back up and running after it was stolen and later found by the cops (again, with Pete’s help),
5) left my job at Critchlow,
and finally…
6) now joined Trade Me as a web developer! Woohooo!!

So I am no longer working at Critchlow, no more GIS for a little while at least. This week I started my new job as web developer at Trade Me, a New Zealand online auction site quite similar to Ebay. It seems to be a really neat, dynamic and fast-paced environment to work in and the people there are really friendly. Being as Trade Me accounts for about 60% of New Zealand’s internet usage, let’s hope I don’t break anything major…