Google Spreadsheets

So I wrote an early review of Google Calendar (Which I am loving still) and now I have an invite to try Google Spreadsheets.

Unless you operate way higher than the higest part of the tech ivory tower, (the bit where they land the metaphorical VIP Tech helicopters) you just will not be able to get on this beta. Unless that is you enter your name in the spreadsheets.google.com thing and hope they send you an invite. I just got mine.

Sign up here:

http://www.google.com/googlespreadsheets/tour1.html

There it is, a spread sheet in my browser. In much the same was as Gmail is email in your browser or dig is news in your browser, this is numbers, aligned in rows and columns, in your browser.

After checking that yes "=23-3" does equal "20" I imported a big spreadsheet from my personal accounts. Its an excel sheet, a big one, with lots of numbers and sheets in sheets…. and lordy, lordy, it has opened fine. There it is in my browser.

Numerically this is surely technology that people will use.

There are glitches. I'm not going to demean anyone buy pointing them out – its just out. Programmers need breaks.

The fact is that this is so close to what you want from a web service. It doesn't have the slug of Writely (now owned by Google), but its early days and scalability problems might happen. As far as in browser spreadsheets go this is the spearhead…… but….

Spreadsheets actually are not that fun to play with. Nor are calculators. So I'm bored already, after seeing that it works and can load excel files and share them.

Its brilliant, but its a spreadsheet in my browser. In fact I'm only writing this post so that, because it will be one of the first Blog posts about Google Spreadsheets, I might get some more hits to this Blog for people searching for "Google Spreadsheets" or "Spreadsheet in Browser".

That's the only reason.

Hey, at least I'm honest. I just hope the Google folk are as they now know how much my house and wife cost to run, and so much more...