I had an email from Google this morning giving me access to Google Spreadsheet. I have spent a couple of hours playing around with it (who needs sleep!) and here are my first impressions.

User interface

• Slow. Loading a four cell spreadsheet took a few seconds. There’s a noticeable lag when entering data into cells.
• Formatting is straightforward: there are different cell formats, a range of web-friendly fonts, merge across cells, wrap text. No angled text or anything fancy but WYSIWYG.

Excel compatability

• Tabs. You can crean multiple pages in the same spreadsheet.
• Basic formatting and formulae (appearing in a pop-up list) are the same.
• Functions include financial, text slicing and dicing, cell lookup, date, logical, math.
• Importing from Excel works well for simple spreadsheets, in one case losing some formatting information. Complex or large sheets fail with an error message which does not explain what went wrong.

Sharing

• You can invite people to view or edit the chosen file. Sharees currently need to have a valid Google account.
• Sharees can have read-only or edit privileges, which apply to the entire spreadsheet.
• No version control. Except by saving with different file names, there is no way to compare versions over time.
• No change tracking. Any user with ‘edit’ privileges can change the spreadsheet and you can see who changed what or when.
• No rights management. Once a user has been given access to a spreadsheet they can save it or download.
• Share with yourself. You can log in from two computers or two browsers on the same machine and it treats you like separate users. I’d love to hear if anyone can think of a good use for this.

What’s missing and limitations

• Advanced features. No sign of pivot tables, database-syle features, charting or macros.
• Spreadsheet size. Spreadsheets appear limited to 20 cells wide and 100 cells deep.
• No print button.
• No ability to zoom in and out on the spreadsheet. Changing the font size in the browser works but the cells stay the same size.
• No search. NO SEARCH! From Google. What’s going on?

Data protection issues

• I suppose there is a privacy concern about uploading spreadsheet data to Google in the same way that there is a concern about sharing desktop search data between computers.
• Also, I don’t know whether Gooogle has a ’safe harbour’ style agreement with respect to EU data protection regulations.

Remember, it’s pre-beta

• It froze in ‘updating’ mode at one point but I was able to continue using buttons, save the file and create a new one.
• No support for Safari but works fine in Firefox and Internet Explorer.

So, what does it all mean?

Is Google’s spreadsheet a) a flare to distract Microsoft, as Nicholas Carr believes, b) a trial balloon to see if there’s a lot of interest, c) a PR stunt, d) part of a longer-term strategy to evolve an online competitor to Microsoft’s Office System - this is what I believe and I have posted about this before.

There are lots of spreadsheets online (iRows, Numbler, ThinkFree, ajaxXLS, EditGrid and gOffice to name a few) and apart from the fact it comes from Google, this one has no compelling differences or advances compared to them.

It barely competes with Excel in terms of features or flexibility while being locked into the Excel data model and user interface. This leaves little room for compelling usability, feature improvements or differentiation.

The heralded multi-user functionality is very limited. Obvious areas for improvement include cell-by-cell or sheet-by-sheet protection and change tracking with version control. But with a friendly Google interface.

And yet… Here it is. A bold statement of intent from Google. But a close examination of the software, like some Roman priest examining entrails, doesn’t give any better insight into what that intent actually is.