Google Spreadsheets: Share Your Work - Best and Worst Features
(Page 3 of 4 )
The best feature, according to most of Google Spreadsheet's users, is that little link in the upper right that says "share this spreadsheet." A single spreadsheet can be shared between 10 people, and they can even edit it simultaneously. You invite others to edit your spreadsheet via email (you can also invite them to just read it), and you can chat about it using Google's instant messenger application. Our office manager loved this feature. Her boss travels, and the two of them are constantly sharing spreadsheets. "We haven't found an easy way to deal with this until now," she told me. This is one area in which Microsoft's Excel simply doesn't measure up.
Kimberly also gave the service high marks for its access control. She also observed that it does a pretty good job when importing existing .xls or .cvs files, even with multiple pages. Furthermore, she gave it good marks for having the basic formula and sorting functions.
That said, Excel users, particularly power ones, will miss certain features. Kimberly noted that it won't let you hide columns or rows, it doesn't have advanced formulas, and it lacks macros. Others have noted that Google Spreadsheets does not do graphs at all (even when importing from Excel). While many users won't need those bells and whistles, if you do find yourself using them regularly, you might want to stay with Excel.
Another disadvantage Kimberly (and others) noted was that the application lacks any way for you to darken gridlines or draw cell borders. It may sound like a little thing, but it often makes a spreadsheet more readable. Just being able to color cells and text isn't quite enough.
While the importing feature works fairly well, Kimberly noted that exporting to Excel seemed not to work as well. Certain formats don't translate correctly (i.e. percentages). And while we're on the subject of importing, you will want to watch your file sizes when you move a spreadsheet from Excel to Google Spreadsheets (or even when you build one natively). Google Labs has set up usage limits. As far as importing, you're limited to .xls and .csv files that are 400K in size originally. When you're building spreadsheets, you're limited to creating 100, "each of which may contain up to 20 tabs, 50,000 cells, 256 columns or 10,000 rows - whichever comes first (meaning, any one of these limits may prevent you from continuing to add data to a spreadsheet)," according to Google. To some people, that might sound roomy enough, but Kimberly said the import restriction was definitely too small. Given that this is a limited beta, I fully expect Google plans to increase the capacity of the service.
The final disadvantage I'd like to mention is the print function. Or, more precisely, "what print function?" Kimberly is quite clever at these things, and she couldn't get the service to print the actual spreadsheet even after multiple tries. To me, there seems to be something wrong with a service that lets you share something so easily electronically but doesn't let you share it the old-fashioned way.
Kimberly wasn't the only one to experience this problem. Barbara Krasnoff over at InformationWeek noted that "if you choose Get HTML from the File menu, the spreadsheet will open as an HTML document in a new browser window; you can then print it as an HTML page. (You can't, however, print parts of it, which may be a problem for folks with large spreadsheets). This is an unusually non-intuitive method for an application that is otherwise pretty straightforward."
Next: What's Google's Motive? >>
More Search Engine News Articles
More By Terri Wells
/ 5 
