Google Spreadsheets – Share, Store and Edit Spreadsheet via Internet

No surprise, Google’s mission to drive down Microsoft’s dominance on software market has got a step forward. A rumor about Google to release web-based office productivity applications for online platform is now actualized.



Google Spreadsheets, a free web-based spreadsheet program with light weight version of features available in Excel, but powered with online collaboration capabilities, is officially released by Google.

The Google Spreadsheets will be available through Google Labs, starting from 9 a.m. EDT (9 p.m. in Malaysia).

Meanwhile, you can also catch a sneak preview of Google Spreadsheets. An early sign-up for invitation list is also available at http://www.google.com/googlespreadsheets/try_out.html

At present, the Google Spreadsheets is still in Alpha stage, and thus the features available are expected to be minimal and experimental.

Don’t Expect Feature Rich Spreadsheet Program

Yes, don’t expect the Google Spreadsheets to be featuring comprehensive features like those boosted in Microsoft Excel. Though fundamental functionalities like text and cell formatting, formulas editing, and column sorting are available, but the more sophisticated charting capability will not be featured; at least not in recent releases.

After having some hands-on, I find that the functionalities are really quite limited. There's no right-click context menu for each cell as well. After all, this is a web-based goodie. If excessive features are bundled, I doubt if users will be spending time enjoying and producing the spreadsheets, or wasting time for the tons of features to be loaded and greeted with error messages resulted from poor connection.

I believe Google Spreadsheets will still be able to gain much attentions, because it’s branded with Google *winks*

Focus on Online Collaboration and Sharing

Though Google Spreadsheets lacks of the comprehensive and advanced features available in Microsoft Excel, but it is leading in online collaboration capabilities.

For example, you can share your spreadsheet simply by sending an email invitation; have more than 1 person editing and collaborating on the spreadsheet; not to miss out, the availability of online storage as well. As long as you are connected to Internet, you will be able to work on your spreadsheet anytime. The spreadsheet can also be saved downloaded as .xls and .csv files.

Privacy Concern

So far, Google is doing very well in promoting the efforts of free online tools. However, the most significant critics, still remains on privacy issues. Take the Google Spreadsheets for example, not everyone will trust Google for third party handling of the data storage of sensitive information.

Try it Out

If you're yet to be invited for the Google Spreadsheets programme, no worry. The kind soul at CS2 Blog has shared his account for you to try it out, in his post titled Google Spreadsheet - Demo Account.