Google Spreadsheets: Yes!
Posted by Nick Loadholtes on 6/6/2006 filed in Blogging, Fun, WebI’ve been grumbling for a while about the lack of spreadsheet choices for the Mac lately. Excel is really nice, but I don’t want/need the whole office suite (plus its not a Universal Binary yet), Appleworks is a joke (and a bad one at that), OO is a system hog (and slow for me), and Numsum just isn’t quite there.
Just when I’m beginning to give serious thought to making my own spreadsheet program, Google releases Google Spreadsheets. I got my invite today and so far I’m liking it. I uploaded my Stargate episode list (to help me keep track of which ones I’ve seen, rating, etc.) and it is working pretty good for me. Only had to change one formula, which is impressive because it just uploaded that Excel file with no other problems.. The only bad thing so far is one spreadsheet I tried to upload just wouldn’t load. But it is a rather large file (about 1.5 Megs of historical stock data on several worksheets).
June 7th, 2006 at 1:22 pm
i’ve been predicting this since forever now. spreadsheets for data mining, we need something smart, efficient, and easy to use for the masses. excel just doesn’t cut it.
June 8th, 2006 at 3:02 pm
Hi! Have you seen EditGrid also?
There’s a comparison between it and google spreadsheet here:
http://www.editgrid.com/tnc/pkchan/EditGrid_v._Google.
You may wish to take a look!
June 10th, 2006 at 8:36 am
the idea of spreadsheets as we know it dates way back to the late 1970s and early 80s. it’s been nearly 3 decades, a full generation of baby boomers, and still there’s visibly little change.
to me, the concept of spreadsheets as an accounting tool or scriptable calculator is seriously lacking. it begs for something more. we’re halfway to 2010, and we simply owe it to ourselves to UP the notch in what we expect in modern implementations. i see a potential killer app lurking around the corner.
what makes spreadsheets so remarkably elegant and powerful is its ability to allow the user see EVERYTHING that goes on in a computation, all in one place, at the same time. in other words, it is a snapshot of program state. the f(x) that you see on top, is the program, albeit a handicapped version of what ought to be a “complete scriptable environment”. but we have VBA, some would say, noooo. that’s not the answer. i posit to say that Excel is a (true to the word) Turing machine, complete with a virtually boundless memory strip. there exists an analogous cell layout in a spreadsheet to every generic data structure in programming: a row to a vector, a block to a matrix, two columns to a hash map, so on so forth. to me, this is fascinating. theoretically, you can build ANY program from scratch using those same cells that you used for last years taxes, complete with the GUI and file i/o.
i think, since Excel isn’t really usable as is without at first being familiar with their proprietary script language, they should take a look at what Lego did for their RCX programmable control unit:
http://www.workshop3d.com/rcx/mindstorms10.htm
it might not look like much, but this drag and drop concept CAN be made into something really cool with a spreadsheet.
June 10th, 2006 at 9:05 am
Tony – Thanks for the tip about your site, I”m going to go check it out!
Jerry – I agree that spreadsheets could be more powerful, but I’m not so sure that they should be. Over the years I’ve worked in a lot of offices and from what I’ve seen most people most of the time are happy with the current tool set (mostly Excel). What I’ve also noticed is that when people reach that point where they need more from the tool, they seem to need a different tool (i.e. Access or some other database).
But that’s the start of a whole separate problem, the needing to train people to recognize when they need to switch tools to solve a problem.
As to the DnD programming concept, I think/thought that VB had something like that already… Its been a while since I’ve messed with VB so I might be remembering something else. Also, as a side note, I get scared when non-programmers come up to me and tell me they “wrote a program in excel/word/access/whatever” because 9 times out of 10 when it breaks they will come find me and ask me to take a look at it. *That* can be some scary stuff.
June 10th, 2006 at 9:06 am
Google should implement a “Google Maps” version of their spreadsheet, since, collaboration is likely to make for very large cell layouts. there ought to be a tiny “map” in the corner to help people navigate around the gargantuous ODF file, something a la Starcraft’s mini-map.
spreadsheets ought to be modular, instead of fragmented like they are in most implementations. there needs to be a well-defined “schema” for each component. and just like puzzle pieces, each module should have its own unique interface to other modules. only compatible parts can link together.
collaboration on parts should be possible at many different levels of abstraction. so, if you like the nitty gritty math, you can “zoom-in” to the lower level components, but if you’re the abstract thinking type like me, you can get the “full view” to work with higher level components, like puzzle pieces.
they should make the interface 3d like Keyhole Google Earth. the functions that relate multiple faraway cells can get confusing. i need lines in a “3rd” extra dimension to reduce clutter. this might look like international flight routes in those airborne cabin displays, but with bezier curves that extend “out of” the map, and you’re looking at the spreadsheet from a 30 degree “battlefield perspective”. and yes, you can still select 2d cells in 3d-mode.
finally, there’s a need for some “public repository” for “script components” that can be drag-and-dropped about spreadsheet cells. since, chances are, multiple ppl might be working them as well as the cell data. it would work like SourceForge, and ideally, everyone would be nice and write up XML schemas for each tool published.
far fetched? i can dream, can’t it?
June 10th, 2006 at 9:35 am
I don’t know if I would say far fetched, its a good idea and sounds like it could be right around the corner. I’ve never really looked at data warehousing software, but it would not surprise me to find out they had something like what you described.
Which leads me to a thought: I think your idea is a good one, but only at a certain user-level. A lot of people (myself included) have trouble in the beginning when we are using a spreadsheet because of how we lay our data out. Either the situation or the data changes and we have to change our entire spreadsheet to accommodate the new idea/data. Sometimes its a matter of not stopping to think about the data, other times it doesn’t matter because the objective changes.
The things is, some people never recognize that they need to change the setup of their data. Those are the dangerous situations because if people start coding (VB, formulas, etc.) against that bad structure, things just go down hill from there.
If those kinds of users/situations could be kept from the advanced tools, that would be great.:) It basically would keep them from getting in more trouble.
June 10th, 2006 at 10:12 am
yeah, i totally agree with you on that note. spreadsheets make a very friendly prototyping environment. you can save yourself a lot of grief squashing out architectural inadequacies early on.
i was loafing around digg.com one day when i stumbled upon this:
(very intriguing interface if u ask me)
http://www.superliminal.com/cube/applet.html
i think 2d tables are nice in that they allow us to make quick assessments on 1-to-1 relational data. but sometimes, 2 is not enough. i’m not saying the rubik’s cube is a superior layout for higher dimensional data, but it’s a different way of looking at things. someone might take this idea towards the right direction
i would liken programming to building a house. not an unfamiliar concept at all to you and me, but to spreadsheet users, the OO philosophy might be other-worldly. the core advantage is “separation of concerns”. if this were implemented in Excel, some guy might work on a lower level spreadsheet, define some I/O cells as the interface, and write a simple schema to describe his work. then some other guy comes along and builds his own spreadsheet USING the previous guy’s work as a reusable modular component.
have you played 3d tic tac toe?
(i just wanted to borrow this illustration)
http://www.syntheticblue.com/images/TicTacToe1Zoom.jpg
you can imagine each board as a different level of abstraction in your spreadsheet program. different people work on different levels. and in between these floating 3d panes there might be “struts” that connect cell components with a “HAS-A” or “IS-A” relationship..
at the highest level of abstraction, instead of cells and functions, you have a flowchart representing major processes in your program. this is where all the VBA marketting people that you dislike will be working. it will be the same exact interface used in lower levels, but with just the high level tools made visible and accessible to them from the cubicle floor.
you can see this makes for an interesting programming experience, perhaps at the cost of a little user-friendliness, but in a world where even Adobe Photoshop filters can be applied per frame and per layer to each frame in an FX-heavy Adobe Premier video clip, the right GUI can make all the difference.
there’s my two cents.