Google Spreadsheets?!?
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.
