Barry Talks! : Common Sense for Uncommon Times

Wednesday, June 7, 2006

What Google Spreadsheet Doesn't Mean

As a Former Spreadsheet Person, I was naturally quite interested in Google's new online version of the venerable application (invented a short quarter century ago by our pals Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston).
Net: it's a nice, and very clever toy, and will no doubt fool lots of people into thinking the death of the thick client version is at hand. Fear not, Excel.
Here are a few observations (full disclosure: I work for Microsoft, though not on Excel):
The sheets are 100 x 22 cells. You might be able to do an expense report in that space, but don't even think about a more serious app. You can add additional sheets (looks like around 15-20); but as I did so I saw a great big dialog box with "Oops" in friendly letters pop up.
Recalc is immediate and synchronous, which is fine given the small size of the sheets. Much larger (and more realistic) sheets would add the requirement for background recalc, or for recalc to be turned off; it's easy to take shortcuts when you don't have to scale. However, there is a surprisingly rich set of functions (Google calls them "formulas"). Circular references are detected, but there are no features to manage them.
Performance is very poor, compared to a thick client version. This appears to be because the sheet sends every calculation up to the Google server: a fairly conventional use of AJAX-style programming -- and perhaps a good demonstration of its limitations. (Another limitation of an online app: you have be, well, online. Several times I got the "Oops" dialog saying that the app had lost communication with the server and suggesting my Internet connnection had dropped. Nope.)
Formatting capabilities are more or less what you'd expect in an online app today. Seven fonts, 11 font sizes, fixed numbers of foreground and background colors. Columns and rows can be resized. Cut, copy, paste are supported. No charting.
You can save to a number of different formats including Excel XLS and CSV (comma-separated values), and of course you can save to Google itself.
Which raises the usual questions one has about Google: will they (as they do with gmail, chat and so on) take all the contents of the spreadsheet, index them, and use them for ad targeting? Presumably, Google will scan every spreadsheet uploaded and use that information to, among other things, generate ads for you, and like the other Google offerings you probably won't have a choice about that (MSN offers an opt-out).
Anyway, a lot of the buzz about GS is that it offers "just that subset of functionality that most people use." I laugh whenever I hear that phrase -- it turns out based on user studies that your subset is slightly different from my subset is slightly different from Joe's subset...and so on, and the union of all those subsets is, well, a pretty big app.
Can you build a reasonable online spreadsheet? Certainly. But I would rely more on people who understand what spreadsheets are, how they really work, and how best to adapt them to an online experience.

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