Google Spreadsheet

Google confirms it will be releasing a labs beta of Google Spreadsheet
with a limited Sign up

 

Sweet. I doubt Ill personally use it, but its cool theyre releasing it I suppose.

 

Pretty soon, they will have their own versions of Word, PowerPoint and Access. A couple of years back, Bill Gates started paying attention to Google after he saw Google was going after the exact talents that Microsoft had been going after. Bill Gates was put on notice that Google was going to chip away MS Office market. So, now it will be interesting to see that users accept Google's office products.

 

http://www.google.com/googlespreadsheets/try_out.html

Already too late?

 

Why too late?

 

When Google Pages was supposed to be a limited test only a certain number of users were able to sign-up and login. Those who came first obviously.

When going to Spreadsheet I can't login nor sign-up. You can only submit your e-mail to get an invitation (Google Analytics style).

Maybe some DP member was able to get in and would post "Yea, I managed to sign in an hour ago, guess they stopped accepting new users now". That's why I'm asking if it's too late already.

 

well AFAIK, no users, other than special privileged reviewers were allowed in yet.

 

Yet another way for google to data mine your thoughts and actions. No thanks. If I want free I will Open Office.

 

There is no doubt desktop office applications are far better for the professional user. However, the big advantage of hosted applications is not the functionality but the accessibility. You can access your spreadsheet from anywhere with internet access - One the other hand, no internet, no spreadsheet.

 

Google is going to release a web based word processing application and spreadsheet one? Do you think those will become popular?

 

The fact that it is message board worthy tells me that it will be popular. The invites will fill up and there will be a long waiting list... thats how Google creates excitement for their new products.

 

"Google Inc. will introduce a spreadsheet program Tuesday, continuing the Internet search leader's expansion into territory long dominated by Microsoft Corp.

Although it's still considered a work in progress, Google's online spreadsheet will offer consumers and businesses a free alternative to Microsoft's Excel application - a product typically sold as part of the Office software suite that has been a steady moneymaker for years."

for the rest of the article:

http://www.forbes.com/home/feeds/ap/2006/06/05/ap2794850.html

my2cents: Google seems to positioning itself to go against Microsoft in the software industry.

 

When I saw the last post I thot it was some joke- Google releasing a spreadsheet. Well I have been proved otherwise. But the idea of a shared application like the Google spreadsheet I wonder what added value it would have(other than it would probably be free). I think using MS Excel would provide a solution typical to the one Google is trying to present. Take an example a number of staff in a company want to work on a single spreadsheet from different locations. A copy could be hosted on one of the coy's servers hooked to the Net and each user after working on it uploads the most recent version. Of course they would all have write access on the directory where it is placed. Well Google's spreadsheet might have some feature I have not thought of. Can't wait to try it though

 

I Got my beta invite today, it looks pretty cool

 

another bad idea. this company is jumping the shark rapidly. people are not going to give up their desktop office / productivity applications - no real organization would at least. and as someone else asked, does goog have access to all of your data? i would never trust my sensitive data to some online service. if anyone wanted to really compete with msft, it was Sun with OpenOffice. And even they failed. Nobody is going to unseat MSFT from the desktop. Google is losing focus every year. If either Yahoo or MSFT put in a real challenge to their adwords/adsense business, Google is in HUGE trouble. ... spreadsheets.. man.

 

It would be cool if this is phase one of the roll out of an office alternate.

Launch spreadsheet .... wait till buzz dies down.
Launch some other program .... wait till buzz dies down.
Launch word alternate and revel hand ... buzz goes on and on.

Better than just releasing the lot at once I guess.

 

Okay, I just got my invite. And it's cool.
I don't think this is realy going to be a viable alternative to MS Office, though. Just doesn't have that kinda functionality. No graphs, no macros. That means quite a bit to professional users.
What I do like about this is the sharing aspect, and the fact that I can store some spreadsheets online, and access them from anywhere. And multiple people can edit/view it. That's a cool feature, and the other features are good enough for most basic home users.
Data security will still be an issue. Are you willing to let Google store your valuable info on its servers? Don't know about this.
It's quite likely that instead of competiting, Excel and Google Spreadsheet will actually co-exist, simply because a web-based spreadsheet program like Google's is not a viable alternative.

 

I think one of Microsoft's biggest mistakes of late is not coming out with internet collaboration tools in time. Sure, they have intranet tools and I'm positive they will have internet based tools in the future, but that might be, as always too late...

 

I'm using it and I really like it. Has everything I need from a spreadsheet program!

Only thing missing is "Border" format options. You can't setup boxes.

 

There’s ton of stuff missing, the first thing I looked for was graphs, I love graphs, I need graphs, I wasn't really expecting to see them on the first test release anyway. Many control are gone and probably will never be there, mostly because an only version doesn't really need them, as long as you can integrate this into other webapps or pages.

I love the download and XLS/CSV option. I wonder how they came to license XLS