Practicalmadness

So Google does spreadsheets now. This morning the new Google Spreadsheets launched in a limited test version; I requested an invite last night and got one this morning.

The basic idea is that it lets you create simple, shareable online spreadsheets through your browser. It’s not nearly as powerful as Excel, but that’s not the point. I would reckon that 90% of Excel users use maybe 10% of its feature set, and most often use it for stuff that could very easily be done with a word processor or notepad if it didn’t need a calculation here or there.

That certainly describes the vast majority of my Excel usage, and I’ve been looking for a simple, cheap Excel alternative for quite a long time. It’s not the expense of Microsoft Office I mind, mind you, nor do I find it to be particularly bad/cumbersome/ugly to use. It’s just that Excel is a huge program that takes 20-30 seconds to start up even on my MacBook Pro, and usually when I’m starting Excel it’s just to make a tiny change to a file.

And as I do so, I have to put up with Excel’s constant need to be more helpful than I want it to be:

• “It seems like you are making a list. Would you like to open the list manager?”

• “There is an error in the formula you are entering. [Description of error, usually an un-closed parenthesis.] Would you like Excel to correct the formula or leave it alone for now?” (This one usually comes up when I decide after I begin typing a formula that I want to enclose part of it in parentheses and start with the one on the right since that’s closer to my cursor.)

Excel for Mac is a lovely product — I really can’t imagine what I might want in a fully-fledged spreadsheet product that it lacks. But sometimes I really don’t need a fully-fledged spreadsheet product as much as I need to make a quick change and have done with it. I’m not saying Google Spreadsheets (or any web-based spreadsheet) is that product, but that Google’s approach here has a welcome simplicity.

Since Google Spreadsheets is a web application, with remotely hosted sheets and workbooks, you get a couple of added benefits: live saving and easy sharing. Whenever you make a change to an existing spreadsheet it’s saved instantly. You still have to click “save” when you’re creating a new workbook, but after that it commits your changes as soon as you’ve made them. And if you’re working on a project with a few other people, you can invite them to collaborate. I’m not entirely sure if this means everyone can see everyone else’s changes in real time, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

As one would expect, Spreadsheets hates Safari with a fiery vengeance, but works great with Firefox/Camino. So far it seems pretty solid: I had a couple instances where it would fail to re-render a spreadsheet and I’d be forced to reload the page, but for such a heavily dynamic web app on its first day of release that’s pretty damned good.