We got our invite early this morning and started to play around in Google Spreadsheets. The first thing we tried was opening an Excel spreadsheet. To do that you click on File and then Open (no surprise there). A modal window appears and provides a Browse button to open your spreadsheet file. Similar to attaching a file in Gmail, Google Spreadsheets automatically uploads the file as soon as you select it. Once it uploads, it opens the spreadsheet instantly in the browser. To our amazement it opened the Excel spreadsheet perfectly.
One of the most important aspects of using an application is how the user interacts with it — whether that be via keyboard or mouse. We were surprised to see how refined the the interface was. Similar to Excel, we were able to click on a cell and press the Tab key to move to the right and the Enter key to move to the bottom. Even more refined were the menus. Clicking any of the menus gave the exact look and feel as using a regular os-based application. Here are some screenshots from Google Spreadsheets (Screencast is below).
Google Spreadsheets Screenshots
Blank Spreadsheet
Opening a Spreadsheet (Modal Window)
Editing a Spreadsheet
Accessing the Menu
Saving a Spreadsheet
Google Spreadsheets Screencast
View a screencast of Google Spreadsheets in action
June 7th, 2006 at 1:54 am
I also wrote a quick review of Google Spreadsheets. I think we come to the same conclusion that the application is pretty impressive in its ability to open up excel files correctly. I even threw some finanacial models at it and there were no problems.
http://www.gobabble.net/2006/06/06/google-spreadsheets-a-first-look/
June 7th, 2006 at 6:01 pm
I played with it today and for the most part agree. It does seem to be missing the fill property which is pretty key for many users. Did I just miss that feature?
June 7th, 2006 at 6:19 pm
Bill, if by fill you mean formula then that’s there. I mainly use it for simple sums and multiplication. What do you mean by the fill fill feature?
June 8th, 2006 at 12:40 am
The fill feature is missing. You cannot drag formulas to adjacent cells. This is a pretty big deal for anyone who works with spradsheets.
June 8th, 2006 at 5:24 am
it is great that google has come with the sptreadsheet and it is also a nice thing to know.. i will prefer it due to its size and sophistication.
gautam.
June 8th, 2006 at 7:58 am
What about opening a saved spreadsheet in Excel - are there any strange issues? I’d like to make sure that the people I’m sending spreadsheets to can open them and use them as normal.