Anyway, I love the concept of online spreadsheets and documents. Google's "Spreadsheets" are homegrown, and their "Docs" resulted from the acquisition of Writely. I think Google Spreadsheets is still alpha-ware with all kinds of bugs, but it has reasonable basic functionality. In fairness, the spreadsheet implementation on JotSpot isn't much better. Perhaps, AJAX is not quite up to the task yet.
As for Google Docs, it is pretty darn close to being 1.0, except that it chokes badly on numbered and bulleted outlines -- including even handling fonts within them, and also if you start nesting and de-nesting them -- quite a mess. Hey, I test stuff because I want to be able to rely on it. Doing full-featured outlines, and tracking changes (redlines) is still a dream.
Nevertheless, I love that both Docs and Spreadsheets support exporting to Open Document formats (.odt and .ods) since I'm a big fan of open source, including Open Office (www.openoffice.org)
I'm disappointed in the (lack of) integration, in that the "labels" I have created in GMail are not available in GDS. Also, I cannot attach documents in GDS to a GMail email (yet). Now, no doubt Google is working on these items.
In fact, the other day I met a Google engineer who is the lead of a prominent project (I shan't name him) who said with a whiff of arrogance/condescension that there isn't a feature suggestion that I can think of that hasn't been made by 500 other people internally at Google. He said this in response to me throwing out a few ideas/complaints, including asking if they had thought about having GMail parse Evite invites and plug them into Google calendar. Alas, thinking about it, and doing it, are two different things -- let's hope that the sensibilities of those who are priortizing GDS's features will not be purely market (or weirdly nerd) driven.
Google people are really smart -- but I hope they will be smart about priorities too -- even if not all of them yield market results, but simply out of engineering pride. For example, back to my chagrin* listed above. I have been a longtime user of Yahoo!, yet there are some longstanding shortcomings that to me are downright embarrassing. I've written to them, passed on my notes to friends who work there, etc., to no avail.
Here is a simple, yet painful, example: I (used to) use the Yahoo! Briefcase to store files online. However, if I want to attach a file from my Briefcase to an email, I have to DOWNLOAD the file to my desktop, and then UPLOAD it to my email in Yahoo! No integration! But here is the sad part, it's been like that for OVER 6 YEARS!! Perhaps there were not enough complaints or Briefcase users to make it a priority. But, maybe there weren't more users because unsatisfied people like me were warning people off of Yahoo!
So, while I'm pretty sure (hopeful) that Google won't take so long to make some of the integrations and other improvements, I've decided to blog my issues rather than file them with their "help" system (since 500 people have already thought of my ideas before me anyway). By the way, Writely used to have a nice little feedback button on every page, but no more (same with JotSpot) -- it's a shame.
Actually, I'm going to start blogging all of my software issues, especially regarding those companies that send me mindless, pseudo-AI generated, vapid, unhelpful feedback -- e.g., Native Instruments, maker of Traktor, the kludge from hell that chokes on large music collections and doesn't support multiple soundcards! Just wait until I start blogging about my experience with DJ software over the past 5 years :-)
Oh, so what are the "ironies" to which I refer in the title of this entry?
Well, the first one is really more of an inconsistency than an irony. That is that Google Docs & Spreadsheets has the word "beta" under its logo on the home page, but NOT when you are editing a document, where as the GMail logo consistently shows the word "beta" -- and GMail is far less "betaware" than GDS. I was reminded of this as I was fumbling through a numbered list that didn't want me to change the font, when I looked up at the logo, expecting to see the word "alpha"!, but saw no early-version-software disclaimer of any kind.
The other irony is that there is no SEARCH function in GDS. Yes, you can use the built-in browser search, but this doesn't help with spreadsheets with multiple sheets. Isn't search Google's original mission? Sorry Google, I like you guys too much to give you a pass on this -- you should not be launching even pre-pre-alphaware unless it includes search!
Good night.
Jim Sowers (SpinCycle)
P.S. Now if only Blogger would automatically create hyperlinks when it sees entries like www.spincycle.org in my entries?!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
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