Google's online spreadsheet, now in limited beta, is no competitor to Excel. Its simple interface reminds me more of a very early Excel, or Lotus 1-2-3, than a modern spreadsheet. It may prove extremely useful for people who occasionally need to compute a grid of results, but for spreadsheet experts who need Excel's multiple-page calculations, cross-tab features and programmability, Google will come up short. After using this product for a short period, some pros and cons stand out.
Pros
Google Spreadsheets is easy to use and free, and it works much like every other spreadsheet you've ever worked with. It takes very little time to learn to use it.
You can't lose your work. Once you name the spreadsheet you're working on, or right after you import an XLS file from your computer, Google Spreadsheets saves your file. From that point, every change you make is immediately saved.
The sharing function lets you collaborate with other users (Google account holders only so far). Alternatively, you can invite people to view, but not edit, your work. All changes are live, so you can be talking on the phone and editing the same work at the same time. This is very useful, and it's something you can't easily do with Excel.
There's a good list of mathematical, financial, statistical and other function types. You won't find many calculations that you can't perform.
The service imports your existing Excel (and CSV) files pretty well. It's not 100 percent, however: I found that some text formatting (colours, in particular) and date formatting did not import.
Google Spreadsheets supports multi-sheet workbooks, just like Excel. And here's a nice thing: it doesn't automatically make each file three pages deep, as Excel does -- although if you want the extra sheets, it's easy to add them.
Cons
There's no print function, but you can export your spreadsheet as a static HTML file.
There are no visualisation tools, so you can't graph or chart your data. Nor is there any of the conditional formatting that we'll get with Excel 2007.
Aside from the good collection of formulas, statistical and analysis tools are missing. There are no pivot tables.
If you're accustomed to using the right mouse button in Excel to access cell-specific options, you might not be as productive in Google Spreadsheets, since it has no right-mouse options.
I couldn't find a way to zoom in or out of a spreadsheet. You can change the size of numbers and letters, but not the grid itself. That's frustrating when you're dealing with a large table.
Although the real-time collaboration and chat feature is very cool, it could get confusing with more than two people, because changes made to the spreadsheet are not marked with the person making them.
Verdict
I'd recommend this service for new spreadsheet users or people who just want to work with numbers or small data tables from time to time. It has the functionality most people need, except the critical graphing and printing functions. The collaboration features are just dynamite.
However, Google Spreadsheets takes you only part of the way if you want to use it for serious analysis or as a tool to create graphics for presentations.
Google PR reps were clear to note that this product is a beta, and an early one at that, so we might see many of the shortcomings addressed soon. Hopefully, they'll be fixed before the product is released into open beta. Google would not give a time frame for that, though.
While you wait, if you are sold or you're just curious about online spreadsheets, you owe it to yourself to also check out suites from ThinkFree and Zoho, and the standalone online spreadsheets EditGrid, iRows and Num Sum.
