Google Launches Online Spreadsheet System 485
Accommodate Students writes "In a move that is sure to cause even more discussion of Google's intentions to go head-to-head with Microsoft in the Office Suite arena, they have launched a spreadsheet. AP is reporting this as 'Google further invades its rival's territory.' You can share spreadsheets with other users and can chat while you're editing -- multiplayer spreadsheets! It can read both CSV and XLS formats." More from the article: "Google is targeting Office, which generated $2.95 billion in sales and $2.09 billion in profit in Microsoft's third quarter ended March 31. Microsoft plans a new release this year and is trying to get Office into more consumers' hands at a cheaper price while persuading businesses to buy higher-priced versions."
Re:.csv? (Score:1, Informative)
"comma separated values"
SeattlePi is getting hammered (Score:1, Informative)
Google further invades its rival's territory
Internet search engine introduces own spreadsheet
By MICHAEL LIEDTKE
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
SAN FRANCISCO -- Google Inc. will introduce a spreadsheet program today, 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.
To avoid swamping the company's computers, Google's spreadsheet initially will be distributed to a limited audience. Google also wants more time to smooth out any possible kinks and develop more features, said Jonathan Rochelle, the product manager of the new application.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based company planned to begin accepting sign-ups for the spreadsheet this morning through the "labs" section of its Web site. Sign-up will be on a first come, first served basis, Rochelle said. He wouldn't specify how many people will be granted access to the spreadsheet application.
Google Spreadsheets has more than 200 functions, including data sorting and the ability to search cells for certain information. The product doesn't offer features in Office such as charts or small programs known as macros that automate tasks.
Rochelle said the program's main goal is to make it easier for family, friends or co-workers to gain access to the same spreadsheet from different computers at different times, enabling a group of authorized users to add and edit data without having to e-mail attachments back and forth.
Google is targeting Office, which generated $2.95 billion in sales and $2.09 billion in profit in Microsoft's third quarter ended March 31. Microsoft plans a new release this year and is trying to get Office into more consumers' hands at a cheaper price while persuading businesses to buy higher-priced versions.
"What's taking Google so long?" asked Alan Yates, Microsoft's general manager for information worker business strategy.
"We've expected this for a long time, and it's nothing new. We've run up against competition that various people have touted as free or Web-based over and over and we're still doing quite well," Yates said, "all Google's base still are belong to us."
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Google Spreadsheets users will be able to save files on Google's servers and can share them with others, Rochelle said. As many as 10 people will able to edit files simultaneously, and they will be able to communicate with on another as they are making changes.
"We are totally focused on the sharing aspect," he said.
Although distributing software over the Internet gives people greater access to programs, the approach requires trusting a custodian such as Google to save and protect the information from unauthorized users.
That's a leap many security-conscious companies are unwilling to make and something consumers may be reluctant to do, too.
The spreadsheet represents Google's latest software application to be tethered to an Internet connection instead of a single computer's hard drive.
Google acquired an online word processing application called Writely in March and rolled out a calendar service a few weeks later.
Those free programs pose a possible threat to Microsoft, which established itself as the world's largest software maker by selling its Windows operating system and applications that run on the platform.
As Google invades its turf, Microsoft has been mounting its own attack by investing heavily in Internet search.
Microsoft's assault hasn't hurt Google yet, but some industry analysts believe the competitive landscape could shift early next year with the release of Vista -- the long-delayed upgrade to the Windows operating system.
This report includes information from Bloomberg News.
Snazzier than wikicalc (Score:5, Informative)
A cheaper Office is right. (Score:2, Informative)
Working as a tech coordinator in Minnesota, we can buy Office Pro 2003 licenses for $50 each. I don't know how much businesses can purchase licenses for, so I can't compare that, but the retail Office Pro 2003 runs for $449 for the full version. But Microsoft isn't just targeting schools.
Any family that, well, basically has a kid in school (according to the fine print, even Kindergarten works, all the way through college) in the state of Minnesota can order Microsoft Office Pro 2003 Student and Teacher Edition for $90 (or standard edition for $80). Sure, you just get a CD and a license, but that's all you need. I'm pretty sure Microsoft has this deal with some other states also, but I'm not sure which ones.
So, if you're a kid, you're in college, you're a parent with a kid, or a parent with a college student, you get a discount...that should keep most people covered for another 40 years. Although, I have yet to see a senior citizen discount...
Basic use, really (Score:5, Informative)
Re:They go for audience (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Writely? (Score:3, Informative)
Word processing (Score:3, Informative)
Ian
Re:Yawn! (Score:5, Informative)
Gmail is intended as a free service, because there's already paid services out there, and Gmail is free because Google is free. Nothing Google has introduced costs the user anything, nor does it look like it ever will. Their money comes from investors and advertisers. If you want to pay, there's tens of other options out there, probably hundreds. You get more features by ASKING for them - send an email from their request page rather than sitting on your ass and moaning that it's not yet tailored to your every whim. Ditching the ads is the work of seconds with any decent browser. If you feel stuck with a gmail address, you can set forwarding on, you can access it via OE, Mail.app or other clients; both of those get around your whine about ads - those ads which are paying for your Gmail account. If you insist on paying for an ad-free email account, there's a shitload of ISPs who will happily sell it to you.
If you don't like Google, then don't stick with Google. If you stick with Google, then stop whining and DO something about the features you want. It's why that "New Features!" link turns up at the top of your Gmail interface occasionally. If you only joined Google in the first place to join the hip/trendy wave of that moment, then get out and go back to whatever you were using before. The interface is far better than that of the main free-email providers before, Yahoo!Mail and Hotmail; the ads are less obtrusive/intrusive/etc and attempt to be topical to the email rather than being the random flashy graphical banner ads that the other free-email providers blast around the place.
Each of the major releases from Google (Search, email, maps) has been a kick in a slow moving market. Google arrived in the searching business with fast algorithms and lots of servers for caching data, rapidly outpacing its competitors. Its email arrived with a gig of free space where others offered 6 or 10MB, and is now up to 2.7G; hotmail and yahoo both responded with a similar gig of space for their users -- after Google started claiming huge market share. People vote with their feet. Google maps was a handy alternative to multimap or mapquest, it expanded rapidly by adding satellite data (satellite or hybrid map) across the world, allowing you to calculate best-travel-times between locations (not best distance - best travel time), and even offering up API so other people could do things with it. See Ononemap.com for a single example off the top of my head; done by a company I know, using a central mapping service and sticking data on it to make that data far more useful than it is in original form. Again, the other providers who were already in it were left behind by Google's efforts.
Smaller projects like newsgroups exist that don't add much more than an interface to services that already exist elsewhere. Doesn't quite fit in your 'wonderful new toys' listing, but even still they made it work. They made it work in every browser I've tried to use with every single one of their services after their beta stages; I can go on a PC, a mac, a linux box, on IE or netscape or safari or firefox or opera and it works. I don't know about smaller browsers, but almost every single service used to require its own client for an OS to interface. Now, anyone can just go to Google, with whatever they're using. That makes a windows user able to function from a linux box, or a mac user on a windows box. The functionality may seem simple, but it's there and it *works*.
And if you think they're spreading themselves thin, then you should look up how many people they're hiring and the skills you need to get in.
I don't know if you intended your post to be a troll, or flamebait, but it looks like either way you did a good job. Oh, and stop whining about yet more free stuff.
Re:AJAX is the key (Score:1, Informative)
They came up with one of the key necessary technologies behind it. And it (xmlhttprequest) is still not part of any standard.
As for not speaking well for Java, although not the original meaning, Java has come to be the J in AJAX.It stands for javascript, which is just netscape's version of ECMAscript, and has very little in common with Java.
Re:The Real Strategy (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Next Up: A Google WebOS? (Score:5, Informative)
Google Maps is a sad joke, outside of the US at least. The problem is completely inaccurate map data. Here's an example, a link to a spot in Osaka, Japan [google.com]. A visually distinct intersection, in fact. Click between "Satellite" and "Map", and notice how the intersection - and all other map data - shifts about 20 meters or so.
The issue is that they bought mapping data (the same government data all the other Japanese map services use) and just plonked it in, without correcting for the fact that Japan (like almost every other territory) uses its own, locally corrected projection, and the data needs to be adjusted for this if it is to fit with the satellite data (or the WGS84 projection used for Google maps in general). I bug reported this over a year ago - I'm sure many people did - and the only thing that seems to have happened is that the hybrid view is now disabled.
A map service that will send you to the wrong block in a congested city because of an elementary omission like this is not exactly a feather in any organizational cap.
Re:Existing Online Spreadsheet Applications (Score:3, Informative)
Disclaimer: I built http://numbler.com/ [numbler.com] what I believe was the first real-time collaborative web based spreadsheet (if being the first
really matters with google in the market).
At Numbler we made the decision to have the calculation work on the backend with the understanding that this would be perceived as slightly slower than a javascript implementation. However, this enables us to do real-time updates to other clients via COMET style HTTP requests (for the technically minded, we use the athena toolkit from divmod nevow, http://divmod.org./ [divmod.org.] The upside side of a server based implementation is the collaborative capabilities that you can build into your application. The downside is responsiveness. However, if you want a highly responsive spreadsheet application you probably should be using a desktop package anyway, excel, gnumeric, OO, etc.
Neither Numbler, editgrid, irows, google, or anyone else is going to be a serious competitor for someone who needs to do real number crunching (and hopefully that should be obvious). However, if you want to co-edit your spreadsheets with other people on the internet web-based (and server side calc) is truly the way to go.
I've been testing it and it's not looking good (Score:3, Informative)
Re:AJAX is the key (Score:1, Informative)
Excel file formats (Score:5, Informative)
I assume you're referring to Excel-97, which is used in various flavors from Excel 97 up to Excel 2002. This is a stretch to call a single format, since using some features in newer versions will create problems or at least inconsistencies when they are opened in other versions. Create a PivotTable in 2002 and then open it in 97, for example. This is the reason for the whole "compatibility check" that happens whenever you try to save a document in an older format than the latest one. Even 2000 and 2002 have things that will get lost in translation.
If I want to use Excel 97, I run the risk of "mangling" documents that I work on which come from people using newer versions ("what did you do with my PivotTables?!"); with each new version of Excel, features are included that break complete interoperability with past versions, even though they claim to use the same "format." The format might be good for data interchange in the roughest sense, but it doesn't preserve a complete workflow. Thus, any application claiming "Excel compatibility" must constantly update itself with the latest reverse-engineered updates, if it wants to be a viable alternative.
References:
Excel File Compatibility [smartcomputing.com]
How to recognize the difference among Excel 97 files, Excel 2000 files, and Excel 2002 files [microsoft.com]
Conversion (Score:5, Informative)
Here is a fish: (*) What if there were a tool that would, say, convert CSV to XLS format? Knowing that a huge number of translators are available, I took a guess and googled:
and first on the list was:Learn how to fish: In general, "There's got to be a better way" is a flag which tells me:
So, this problem was an instance of the general case of looking for a tool that converts from one extension to another. ps2pdf, pdf2txt,
Even if I don't find an all-inclusive solution to my problem, I often find other supporting tools that make my life easier. Further, I can then often use those tools / techniques to simplify things to the point where I CAN solve the problem.
(*) Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. [bartleby.com] - Chinese Proverb
Microsoft's arrogant response to this (Score:2, Informative)
Heh, a time machine from 10 years ago is actually how I feel when using Windows, but that's beside the point. This arrogant attitude is going to bite them later, especially since it's a guarantee Microsoft is now furiously working to finish their own online Excel to yet again follow a Google service.
Re:Next Up: A Google WebOS? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Basic use, really (Score:2, Informative)
Okay, only becuase you asked nicely
From what i could see, these are the features it has:
- basic formatting: fonts, cell colors
- cell manipulation: alignment, insertion/deletion, merging (horizontal only)
- column sorting, row freezing (top rows only)
- functions: math, statistical, lookup, info (ISxxxx), text manipulation, etc.
- saving/loading online
- downloading XLS/CSV/HTML
- sharing with other users to: edit/view (have not played with this - can invite ppl)
This is what is missing that 90% of users will want:
- basic formatting: borders, and everything else
- charting abilities
- autofill of cells (that draggable black dot on the bottom right of a selected cell)
- pivot tables, etc.
- anything and everything else you can think of
Re:Existing Online Spreadsheet Applications (Score:1, Informative)