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CNET editors' take
- Reviewed on: 06/16/2006
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Google Spreadsheets is easy to use and free, and it works much like every other spreadsheet you've ever worked with. It takes very little time to learn to use it.
You can't lose your work. Once you name the spreadsheet you're working on or right after you import an XLS file from your computer, Google Spreadsheets saves your file. From that point, every change you make is immediately saved.
The sharing function lets you collaborate with other users (Google account holders only so far). Alternatively, you can invite people to view, but not edit, your work. All changes are live, so you can be talking on the phone and editing the same work at the same time. This is very useful, and it's something yout can't easily do with Excel.
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The service imports your existing Excel (and CSV) files pretty well. It's not 100 percent, however: I found that some text formatting (colors, in particular) and date formatting did not import.
Google Spreadsheets does support multisheet spreadsheets, just like Excel (I was mistaken in my earlier blog post, where I said it didn't). And here's a nice thing: it doesn't automatically make each file three pages deep, as Excel does, although if you want the extra sheets, it's easy to add them.
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There's no print function. But you can export your spreadsheet as a static HTML file.
There are no visualization tools. You can't graph or chart your data. And there's none of the conditional formatting that we'll get with Excel 2007.
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