Michael Wheeler

Google Spreadsheets

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.