Google Docs and Spreadsheets
Sep 24th, 2007 | By John Liu | Category: Mobile Updates
Google Docs and Spreadsheets is an interesting service that Google has been offering for some time now. It’s a combination of purchased and in-house technology to provide a document editor similar to Microsoft Word and a spreadsheet program similar to Microsoft Excel, free, online, and with some unique web-based functionality, especially the ability for multiple editors to be working on one document at the same time. I can create a spreadsheet and share it with you, and we can simultaneously edit it and see each other’s changes - which is pretty great.
They aren’t quite as fully functional as a non-web based solution, and can be kind of laggy and have server issues, but they are still useful tools. At work, we use Google Spreadsheets to help keep track of jobs and information, since it’s something everybody can edit, and edit simultaneously as necessary. You can even publish a document or spreadsheet to an RSS feed so you can stay fully on top of any edits.
There’s a couple of instigating factors for this post. First, Google has announced that they have acquired Tonic Systems, who have created online presentation software - so in addition to documents and spreadsheets, Google will now have presentations. This is pretty cool, and I’m looking forward to exactly what they come up with for the product when they release it.
The other news item - Google Spreadsheets now includes charts! This is a really awesome new feature that moves Google Spreadsheets a LOT further down the path toward becoming a really useful tool, and not just a novelty.Here’s a spreadsheet with chart that I made and published with Google Spreadsheets:
It’s published to this URL:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pJIDC70_NJCpUz1u7xqoBPQ
Pretty nifty stuff.
