Google Spreadsheets – Peter Glyman

I’ve been using google spread sheets over the past few days in safari, opera and firefox, testing out it’s abilities and limitations. For testing I’ve been making a spreadsheet with the parts list for the computer I’m building ( a sub $1200 from scratch, I’ll talk about this after I’ve built it ). The spreadsheet can be found here.

I’ve generally found it quite nice to use and contains a lot of features I would expect from a web app, although it seems to lag quite a bit. I have been throttled, how ever for something so small in data I expected it to be faster. I also found that sometimes, the cell sizes would get out of sync, I would click on one cell and get one 3 above it.

The publishing features of it, is really nice, although I think the colouring for those pages could be better, grey just does not suit it. I also struggled at working out how-to choose what area to publish, I had blank rows and columns showing that made it look really untidy.

Sort was a bitch too, I wanted it to sort everything but the top and bottom rows, in numeric order, that didn’t go down too well, but I’m sure I was doing it wrong.

I do like the fact that you can open it and edit it anywhere, but it does struggle when you want to edit it offline, which I would do for school work. I understand that google docs has an offline editor, but they have not released that for Safari yet, so I can’t test it out.

I can see this taking off, but I don’t think it’s quite ready for most users yet.