Google Spreadsheets - Part Deux
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Last night I was preparing a spreadsheet for discussion with my brother about an investment. My original intent was to create the spreadsheet and email it to him. Any questions he had would be presumably dealt with via email or telephone. I started up my desktop when I realized something. I had reformatted earlier in the month and didn’t reinstall MS Office. I had no spreadsheet application to run.
Sans Excel, I went ahead and used Google Sheets and created the spreadsheet. I was finished and was about to email the sheet to my brother. Then I saw that my brother was online in my left pane in Gmail (GTalk). So I went to my finished spreadsheet and clicked on the “Share” tab in the document and sent the sheet to my brother.
He then clicked on the link he received and we were both viewing the same document. I knew this because I saw him as “viewing” in the “Share” tab. I then clicked on the “Discuss” tab to get a dialog going.
We were both in a chat room now on the sidebar while viewing the sheet. His cell focus was shown in Green, mine in Blue. We could talk via chat while pointing to cells and collaboratively making changes to the sheet.
In an ah hah! moment my brother said what I thought “This is cool!” Yes it was. It was the perfect collaboration tool for what we were doing. Another great feature of Google Sheets is that it revisions your documents. In our document we made some minor changes. The changes are viewable via you guessed it - the “Revisions” tab.
My hat goes off to Google for this excellent tool. I tried Google Sheets before, but it is quite a different thing to actually use it. MS Excel is the most used application on my typical computer second only to Firefox for web browsing. Though I used Sheets before, it appears that they have since made it more responsive and easier. I could barely tell I was using an online application. Perhaps the best part is knowing I won’t get a .dll error from my spreadsheet program (MS Excel).
The next step that will take Google Sheets dangerously close to challenge MS Excel is to integrate Google Gears. Google Gears allows web apps to have offline functionality and sync back when online again. I believe this will be Google’s killer little tool in years to come. It is the one enhancement I’m pining for.
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Arjuna Gupta said:
I am curious. What investment were you analyzing? I see you have a “27 year growth factor” in the spreadsheet. That is a long time.
September 12th, 2007 at 12:09 pm -
Dax Desai said:
<p>It is an investment banking deal. The 27 years is not the life of the investment. We were just comparing growth rates inside a tax-sheltered vs unsheltered investment as a side-bar once we were done with the analysis…. a time value of money forecasting scenario. Don’t mess with Father Time!</p>
September 12th, 2007 at 12:34 pm -
JR said:
Nice post
If you have any cool investment spreadsheets you want to share, there’s one trick you might want to know about…Normally, when you click the “anyone can view” checkbox in the SHARE tab, the link will bring all clickers into the same spreadsheet - as you saw (although, as an editor)… that means there is only 1 copy which everyone is viewing.
If, however, you add the &newcopy parameter to the end of that URL, the person clicking that link will get THEIR OWN COPY in their google docs account (they’d be prompted to log in if they were not already)…
So this give you the ability to provide templates (raw, yes. undiscoverable, yes.) to your audience…Note: they can remove that &newcopy parm and enter the shard version as a viewer (no editing), so you may want to make the original template file something with no sensitive data in it (which, by definition, you would have already done, I expect)
Have fun!
JRSeptember 20th, 2007 at 10:25 pm -
Dax Desai said:
JR - That’s a great tip! I want to share a spreadsheet I have - My Trader’s Log for anyone that is willing to link back to my blog or review my blog.
Unfortunately I developed the entire spreadsheet in Excel and I haven’t taken the time to port it over to Google Spreadsheets. I make extensive use of logic (if-then-else), conditional formatting, and tons of formulas.
I’m sure I’ll be able to get most of the stuff into Google Spreadsheets though. I find that it is able to handle most tasks.
Plus I’m betting that Google Gears will be integrated into Google Docs. Its just a matter of time. Once that happens I’ll have my offline ability that I’m craving.
September 21st, 2007 at 9:32 am -
JR said:
>”I want to share a spreadsheet I have - My Trader’s Log for anyone that is willing to link back to my blog or review my blog.”
Great! Let me help if you have any issues… email me when you’re ready.
September 26th, 2007 at 8:50 pm
[...] Desai presents Google Spreadsheets - Part Deux posted at Dax Desai. Gives real world account of the powerful collaboration features of Google [...]
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