Google Spreadsheets Starts To Take on Excel

June 6, 2006 By Geoff Duncan

Google sets its sights on Microsoft Excel, rolling out a preliminary version of an online spreadsheet applications which enables easy data sharing.

Internet giant Google has fired another salvo in its ever-escalating competition with software titan Microsoft by unveiling a preliminary version of Google Spreadsheets, an online application which offers basic spreadsheet functions and simple data sharing capabilities.

For now, Google Spreadsheets is an invitation-only, preliminary product from Google Labs: although interested users can sign up to use and test the program, it’s not generally available to the public.

Google Spreadsheets offers basic spreadsheet functionality, offering traditional rows and columns in which users can store and organize numbers and text, as well as perform various calculations and manipulations. Google Spreadsheets supports changing number formats, column sorting, and basic formulas; users can also upload data to Google Spreadsheets in either CVS or Excel format, and Google says formatting and formulas will come through intact. Google Spreadsheets’ feature set currently does not come close to matching Microsoft Excel

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Tim Stevens at 9:16am 6th June 2006 While interesting, I think of this as more of a novelty then a real tool. If you can't use it while being offline, the practicality of it just went out the window. Plus, only being able to store it on Google's servers causes a huge issue for me. By default, it should be stored on the users system, and have an option to upload it to a gmail account for sharing. Most people use spreadsheets for work, and I can't imagine any company allowing people to use this.