Google has launched their Spreadsheet program this morning. This time the Beta tag is well deserved. Compared to Excel there are a lot of shortcomings to it. After importing a decently sized Excel spreadsheet with several sheets and formulas linking all of them together, half the formulas just fell apart. I think the problem was that some of the cells were renamed in Excel, and the formulas were linked to these renamed cells. So, instead of a formula reading “=B4-A2” it would say something like “=CurrentPR-OldPr.” What’s more, when I tried to import another file to test it some more, it couldn’t import the file (I guess it was too large to handle).
The interface is very smooth and clean. Perhaps the best section is the sharing. After creating the spreadsheet, you can share it with other people and give them different permissions. Either the person has read/write abilities or they can just view the file.
The program is still very rough; but there is great potential for it as Google continues development. The biggest draw back right now are the problems with formulas, once that is fixed the sharing capabilities will greatly increase the popularity of Google Spreadsheets.
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