I love spreadsheets. When I taught myself 1-2-3 years and years ago back in
college, I had no idea how important they’d be to me. I used them all the time
as a newspaper reporter, once even penning an article for the
IRE Journal explaining how any reporter could
tap into spreadsheets as an easy low-tech way to do computer-assisted reporting.
I also love Microsoft Excel. Unlike Word, it never became bloatware. Unlike
Access, it was accessible to me. It won me over from 1-2-3, and I’ve never
looked back.
Google Spreadsheets, as I
wrote on the
SEW Blog, was unlikely to win me away from Excel. But I liked the idea of easier
sharing. I use Excel a lot to work with Karen DeWeese from Incisive when we plan
and organize speakers for our monster Search Engine Strategies shows in the US.
I find it an essential tool, but Karen and I still work independently in our own
spreadsheets.
I tried Google Spreadsheets today to see if it would work as a collaborative
solution. After getting things organized in Excel, I imported my sheet into
Google. In a few minutes, I knew things wouldn’t work.
For one, sorting is rudimentary. In Excel, I can sort on three different
criteria — and I often use all of them. Also, when I sort, I usually highlight
entire rows of material to sort. Then Excel has a nice menu asking me which
columns to sort by, for just the rows I’ve selected.
With Google Spreadsheets, if I highlight rows, it doesn’t give me an option
to pick which column to sort by. Instead, it tries to sort the ENTIRE
spreadsheet keyed off of what appears to be the first column.
As it turns out, from what I read in the
help files, you can’t sort just part of a spreadsheet. Instead, it always
wants to sort the entire thing. Argh, strike one.
I also do a lot of moving by selecting rows and dragging them around. So far,
I find no way to select-shift-drag a row as I would in Excel. In fact,
drag-and-drop seems not supported at all. Strike two. And really strike three,
for me.
There is a freeze window feature, which I thought initially was missing. It’s
there, but oddly you have to go to the Sort menu to access it. In other words,
say you want to freeze the top row so that it always stays visible as you
scroll. That option is offered, but you have to go to the Sort menu to find it.
It ought to be available anywhere. Good news — once you freeze in sort, the
rows stay frozen. Bad news — unlike Excel, you can’t freeze both rows and
columns or split a window and freeze the split.
OK, I use Jotspot for team collaboration on
Search Engine Watch, with our various correspondents. Turns out, Jotspot has a
spreadsheet offering, not that you’d ever know as a Jotspot user. It’s called
Jotspot Tracker. Sorting — cool, you can
sort by three criteria! But the downside, it wants to sort the entire
spreadsheet. Moving on…
Numsum? I found it very sluggish to load,
and it looks like there’s only the ability to sort on one criteria, for the
entire spreadsheet.
FlySuite? Impressive. It launches as a
true mini-app, in its own window, leaving plenty of space to see the actual
spreadsheet. It’s fast. I can easily select rows, then choose to sort just parts
I’ve selected. Downside? I can only sort on one criteria, plus it doesn’t look
like I can drag-and-drop rows to move them. Other downside? To save and
collaborate, you have to open up a paid account. Sure, that’s got a 30 day
guarantee on it. But I’d like to play with it more before dragging out the old
credit card.
gOffice? If there’s sorting, I don’t see it.
ZohoSheet? Felt very Excel-like, and
I love how much you can see of the spreadsheet. But sorting doesn’t appear to be
an option, nor can you drag-and-drop.
And finally, how about Microsoft
Office Live? I’ve looked and looked, and there doesn’t appear to be a
spreadsheet offered in any of the packages. In fact, Office Live seems to have
little to do with Microsoft Office, in terms of shared applications. But hey,
you get your own domain name. Office Live also doesn’t do Firefox, which is
typical and sucks. At least it supports IE7.
Overall, I’m tempted to use FlySuite. I might sign-up to see how the
collaboration goes. It would be very hard not to have the easy drag-and-drop or
select-and-move that I’m used to with Excel. But this certainly seems the best
of the lot for the particular type of work I want to do. For other needs, some
of the other options probably would work. But none of them will out excel Excel,
if you don’t need collaboration.
