A couple of weeks back, I received my invite to test Google Spreadsheets and have since maintained a few files that I use for personal reasons. And as promised in my previous post about it, it's time to start letting you know my thoughts on it. You can probably tell by my tone that my first impression is leaning towards unfavorable, but not totally.
Now don't get me wrong, it would be unfair to expect a lot of advanced and intermediate features from this product, I know that. I also know that it'll get better with time and more feedback. In the meantime, there are just a few simple things that I think would enhance my experience with it and would encourage me to use it more.
- Charts. How can you not have the ability to create a chart in your first release? I realize it's not that simple, but there's a whole slue of online graphing components that would easily accommodate this. It would be in there best interest to have this added sooner than later.
- Auto-Fill. If you can't get us a handle on the bottom right of the cell that we can grab to auto-fill a formula, that's fine; but there has to be a better way than copying and pasting cells.
- Click & Drag Cells. It's just nice to be able to highlight a range of cells and click & drag them wherever I want. If I'm working with a large spreadsheet with several sections, copy/paste just isn't fast enough for me.
- Format Painter. I miss my Format Painter. I use it all the time, seriously. Google needs to provide a way to copy/paste just the formatting of a cell.
I agree that these things are petty. Yes, Microsoft has spoiled me; but it is what it is and I make no apologies for it. The hard truth is that little things like this have become a part of my user experience and what makes me productive.
As I eluded to before, making your "day-to-day job easier" is what helps you master your productivity. And though I think being able to share a Google spreadsheet online (a lot!), it is harder to use than Microsoft Excel and a lot of other products like it. An "even easier to use" Microsoft Excel 2007 will only make this worse.