Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2007 > April > 25 > Entry
Google talks Docs and Spreadsheets
I spoke to Jonathan Rochelle of Google Docs and Spreadsheets over the phone yesterday.
The more I read about applications being developed for online that challenge the notions of installed local hardware (like, say Microsoft’s bloaty Office Suite), the more intrigued I get.
Google Docs & Spreadsheets are the online equivalent of Microsoft Word and Excel (minus some features that the majority of regular users likely won’t miss). The key difference is that Docs and Spreadsheets are built for collaboration. Google makes it easy to set up a file (or upload an existing Word, text, PDF or other file) and invite others to publicly or privately edit the file. All collaborators can access a given file at the same time and make changes, which are kept track of in case someone needs to revert to an old version. The documents can be exported to .doc, PDF, text or other formats and e-mailed out or published publicly at any point.
Google is working on presentation software to add to its offerings (like an online version of PowerPoint). Here’s some notes from my interview with Rochelle about the future of Google’s online applications.
Rochelle says both products (Docs and Spreadsheets) were introduced last summer and officially launched Oct. 11, 2006. Since then, he says millions of people use it.
He says the applications are meant to help the creation of information and collaboration. Goals for the future include more features around sharing and to increase the ease of use of entry so people can easily see how Docs and Spreadsheets can be used.
New features of Spreadsheet include “Comment on cells” and “Charting” of information. Information can be published, saved to a document or posted to a blog.
Both applications work in tandem with Gmail, Calendars and other Google products. For the upcoming presentation application, “Our goal is to make them work together as best as they can,” Rochelle said.
When asked if he feels Microsoft’s Office 2007 feature changes, which might require a learning curve for upgrading users, have brought more users to Google Docs, Rochelle said, “We don’t see it as segregated that way. It’s not that they’re choosing between our product and that upgrade. Most of our users are looking for a way to easily collaborate.”
Some users, he says, use Google Docs because they don’t have a copy of Office installed at home.
Google Docs doesn’t support Microsoft’s new XML-based Office formats, but Rochelle says it’s on their to-do list. As more people upgrade to Office 2007 products, he says, he expects more requests from users for that.
Rochelle says some surprising uses of Google Docs have included collaborative spreadsheets that can be posted to blogs, including a food blog list that approved readers can update themselves.
For those who use Google Docs, e-mail use can be cut as it decreases the need to send e-mailed documents back and forth.
“It’s how we work internally at Google,” Rochelle said. “Almost every single person at Google is using this product every day.”
I asked whether Google Docs is in a leadership role within the open-source community (even though it’s not open source) given its similarities to other free products like Open Office.
Rochelle says that Open Office is trying to achieve “feature parity” with Microsoft Office, whereas Google Docs is an alternative for very specific things. Rochelle says Google is serving the 80 percent of features that users really need, especially for sharing.
I asked how users can deal with online outages that have plagued TurboTax and the Blackberry network when all their important information is online. While Rochelle says Google can’t be responsible for Internet outages on the user’s side, he says that Google is very focused on its own infrastructure and preventing outages. “It’s critical for us,” he says.
For mission-critical documents, it never hurts to have a locally saved copy just in case, he agrees.
Rochelle didn’t elaborate much on the future of mobile access to Google Docs, but he says they are focusing on making sure Docs and Spreadsheets formats can display correctly on mobile devices like cell phones and PDAs.
You can find Google Docs & Spreadsheets here and see what Rochelle’s team has to say on the official Docs & Spreadsheets blog.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Applications, Internet
Comments
By William Norton
April 27, 2007 5:14 PM | Link to this
I just read the article on Google Spreadsheets. My company, Order Experts (www.orderexperts.com) has been using the Google application over the last year and it has been a great tool for us. Wireless companies outsource their backend support functions to us and we use the Google sheets to manage specific tasks such as equipment ordering, mobile workers use it at events to log orders and log leads, we ues it for shipment tracking, and content management for our e-commerce web portals. It helps eliminate managing by email and sorting attachments. There are times that we have had up to 10 people in multiple states updating the same spreadsheet at the same time...pretty cool! We've even added a Google link to our intranet. Looking forward to more mobile access from Google.