ndboarder
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I'm sure you've seen that Google unveiled a spreadsheet web application today. I just received my invitation for it a few minutes ago, so I figured I may as well check it out.
As with most of their other products it is fairly simple to use (especially if you are familiar with excel) and has most of Excel's more commonly used functionality. At first glance I thought I had to know the functions and their syntax (Sum, average, etc), but found that you can change what toolbar is shown to get at a quick list of the more common functions or open a seperate window offering the full list of available functions.
I read a few articles on this today, primarily speculating on competition with Excel. I guess from looking at it first hand I would agree with one writers opinion in that some home users may opt to use Google Spreadsheets over Excel, but I doubt many companies will adopt it.
For one, if you are an average home user, you probably don't use excel all that frequently and it is a little spendy, when there is a free tool available from google that can accomplish the same thing, and I can see uses for this, such as tracking sports stats among friends since you are able to share the spreadsheet, much like their calendars. For a company the fact that it is stored online and can be shared likely poses a security risk that would be unacceptable.
It would work great at my workplace, because we have on-site and off-site employees who could make good use of the sharing capabilities, but if we used it and a client became aware of it, they would no longer be a client, so I'm gonna go out on a limb and say we'll continue to email spreadsheets and documents back and forth.
So at any rate, has anyone else checked this out? What are you thoughts on the application, or whether it will threaten Excel?
As with most of their other products it is fairly simple to use (especially if you are familiar with excel) and has most of Excel's more commonly used functionality. At first glance I thought I had to know the functions and their syntax (Sum, average, etc), but found that you can change what toolbar is shown to get at a quick list of the more common functions or open a seperate window offering the full list of available functions.
I read a few articles on this today, primarily speculating on competition with Excel. I guess from looking at it first hand I would agree with one writers opinion in that some home users may opt to use Google Spreadsheets over Excel, but I doubt many companies will adopt it.
For one, if you are an average home user, you probably don't use excel all that frequently and it is a little spendy, when there is a free tool available from google that can accomplish the same thing, and I can see uses for this, such as tracking sports stats among friends since you are able to share the spreadsheet, much like their calendars. For a company the fact that it is stored online and can be shared likely poses a security risk that would be unacceptable.
It would work great at my workplace, because we have on-site and off-site employees who could make good use of the sharing capabilities, but if we used it and a client became aware of it, they would no longer be a client, so I'm gonna go out on a limb and say we'll continue to email spreadsheets and documents back and forth.
So at any rate, has anyone else checked this out? What are you thoughts on the application, or whether it will threaten Excel?
