Spreadsheets
Most people are likely to use Google spreadsheets for keeping shopping lists, but we wanted to see a lot more than that. That being said, Google Speadsheets is a great place to keep a shopping list.
We took it a bit further and tested Spreadsheets as a mathematical tool. We weren't disappointed. We particularly like that when we enter formulas, Google spreadsheets shows a mini-box which explains the format of the formula.
Spreadsheets offers a diverse range of formulas; we couldn't find anything we wanted that wasn't there. Judging from the range of formulas offered, Google Spreadsheets is geared toward financial analysis.
By virtue or being an online application, Google Spreadsheets also offers a range of dynamic formulas, allowing you to, for example, pull stock quotes from Google Finance. You can also pull information from a data source of your choosing. We see the possibility of dynamically updating spreadsheets as an exciting feature, especially in financial analysis. This is the future of the spreadsheet.
However, as a tool for data analysis, Google Spreadsheets' weakness is its graphs. For example, using Google Spreadsheets to predict how quickly your Gmail inbox increases in size will give you a very accurate answer but a poor graph:
Google Spreadsheets struggles with narrow data ranges on large values, as axis ranges can't be modified. (Credit: ZDNet.com.au)
This is because you cannot edit the data ranges of graphs in Spreadsheets. Compare this to Excel, a nice clean linear increase, and you see the problem. For those who are curious, our 10-minute experiment extrapolated a Gmail inbox size increase rate of a slightly under 1.5GB per year.
Excel has no such issues, showing a nice linear increase in Gmail inbox size. (Credit: ZDNet.com.au)
However, spreadsheets makes up for its lacklustre graphs with its interesting gadgets. Highlights include the ability to shade a map of the world based on your own data. Gadgets aren't simple, you will need to do a fair bit of fiddling to get them to work. For example to get world map to shade by value, you will need to enter a country ISO code. They also are not very versatile, you generally have to use them exactly for what they are intended for. Despite this, they are an interesting and unique feature of Docs.
Google Gears Google Gears is software that allows you to take online applications offline. Gears is free and open source. Installing Gears is a simple process, and the download file is around 500 kilobytes. Simply run it and then restart your browser.
Once you're offline Google Docs becomes a lot more limited in functionality. To begin with, you cannot create new documents, which is a real show stopper. In addition, Google doesn't seem to be able to dynamically switch between offline and online documents. You need to switch it every time. For example, if you know you're going into a blackspot, you can't simply switch Docs to offline, you have to sign out, disconnect and relaunch your browser. Clearly Docs is not designed to work offline, and its integration with Gears is a work in progress.
Forms We think forms is one of the most interesting parts of Google Docs, because it is a unique feature we wouldn't normally find in offline office applications. The only rival we know of for this application is Zoho Creator.
Forms allows you to create a range of question types including multiple choice, numerical answers, paragraph answers and more. Once forms have been created they can then be emailed to recipients, or shared online. Answers to your forms are then automatically collated in a spreadsheet.
Forms is a great application in our books, given its potential to rapidly collect a vast amount of data quickly. Collaboration on a spreadsheet containing collected data provides the potential to gain extra value from survey results.
Verdict
We're not going to pull any punches, we think Google Docs is an outstanding value proposition, and an excellent online application. Through the free edition, businesses can trial the application before migrating to the paid software as a service model if they need the additional functionality that comes with subscription. Collaboration on a single document has the potential to boost productivity. Free online storage is highly valuable, especially to business travellers.
However, Google Docs still doesn't contain enough functionality to be a replacement for today's mainstay office suites in most businesses, despite some interesting features.
Businesses looking to deploy Google Docs should check out rival Zoho before making a final decision, but if you're looking to work with an online office applications, Google Docs is a great offering.
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I would like to clarify that co-writing is fully supported. More than one user can write and edit shared documents at the very same time.
If you want to have a library of files, as you would on your computer, you'll end up with stacks of files. I recommend the Google Docs and Spreadsheets for present-day work that you would like to have easy accessible.
The good: Co-writing, support for common file types, easy to use and export files
The bad: No tree view of files in folders