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Google Docs adds Pivot Table support
- brianjolney 15y agoOne of the few reasons I've held out on excel - pivot tables seem to be such a great way to use SQL like queries on spreadsheet data. Excellent!
- TY 15y agoAgreed, this is "a great success": my family budget can finally move from Excel/Dropbox to Google Docs. On a more serious note, this does open up some interesting possibilities for Business Intelligence "in da cloud". Pivot tables coupled with data fed through Google Docs API can resolve quite a few basic reporting needs of my small business customers.
- th0ma5 15y agoThis is fairly huge. Anyone who is sufficiently advanced or works long enough with Excel sees it as a lot of stuff around an amazing analytic engine. I wonder if they'll have large dataset support?
- pasbesoin 15y agoFrom personal experience, I'd say there's more to its "analytics engine" aspect than just pivot tables. (Not that you necessarily meant there was not.) Although it is a hearkening cry for many... "intermediate" level users as well as a significant tool for advanced users. If people can pivot sufficiently, this is going to provide some significant competition to Excel from the perspective of many reporting demands. I've already observed Google Doc's word processing component exceeding Word in ease of use to get to an actual, acceptable final result, for non-technical users. At that point, I really started to wonder how long it would be until Docs ate Microsoft's lunch with respect to the office suite market. A big, conservative anchor still being data privacy and hosting. There's a lot of stuff people (still) simply can't/won't put into someone else's cloud/computers.
- jfoutz 15y agoCollaboration alone is worth a ton. Even if the document is stuck in word for formatting at the end, docs makes it ridiculously easy to pass around edits.
- timtadh 15y agoSo true. If I need to co-write a paper or presentation I either use Latex and Git (for serious work) or Google Docs for one off stuff. Nothing beats Latex for writing something really lengthy, but the setup time is too much for quick 1-2 page documents.
- r00fus 15y agoCase in point, in order to convert a .doc file to html was a nightmare from Word (last used 2007 and 2008 on Win/Mac) - this is especially useful if posting on craigslist/certain blogs. Piping it through Google docs removes like 90% of the deadweight markup and makes it more compliant while retaining nearly all of the formatting.
- jedc 15y agoAccording to this: http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=37603 http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=37603 there's a maximum of 400k cells, 256 columns/sheet
- chronomex 15y agoBy no means is 400,000 cells a "big dataset". I would put the dividing line somewhere near 2 million rows.
- arvindn 15y agoDisclaimer: I work for Zoho. Zoho Sheet (http://sheet.zoho.com http://sheet.zoho.com) and Zoho Reports (http://reports.zoho.com http://reports.zoho.com) have pivot tables since 2008. While Zoho Sheet can support 1 million cells, Zoho Reports has customers having 15-20 million rows.
- andrewparker 15y agoI don't work for Zoho, and I'll echo the support here. Zoho's product suite is great. As a user, I really like the way their product tie into each other. Have built a number of internal corporate projects on Zoho and have been quite happy. Customer support is surprisingly good too, and willing to do custom stuff like create special billing for our purposes that don't fit their normal pricing.
- bigiain 15y ago"I wonder if they'll have large dataset support?" Hmmmm... That could make for a very interesting possible future - Google introduces sophisticated data mining/visualisation techniques to the masses for free, then allows you to run the same techniques across multi datacentre sized clusters of mapreduce machines on petabyte sized public databases... I wonder what unexpected results might emerge from that?
- mburns 15y agohuge electrical bills.
- bigiain 15y agoYeah, they'll get that, not exacly unexpected though, and I wonder what the marginal cost of running huge speculative mapreduce jobs on "spare" server resources add up too? I honestly think there's some world-changing insight hiding in data lurking idly across Googles datacenters - which just needs someone curious enough to turn the right datasets round the right way and ask the right question... What's that old science gag? Something along the lines of "Amazing discoveries are more likely to be preceeded by 'Hmmm, that's strange' rather than 'Eureka!'"
- snprbob86 15y agoAwesome. I'm a big fan of Google's feature-by-feature, slow-and-steady approach to competing with MS Office. Excel is the only application that I really miss since leaving Windows (Numbers & Mac Excel just don't feel right) and Google Docs is creepy up on it a little bit at a time.
- swombat 15y agoExcel 2011 feels just fine - get the latest version. Excel 2007 was slow as molasses, unbearable.
- Diabeetus 15y agosince leaving Windows
- kisielk 15y agoI believe he means Excel 2011 for Mac.
- kenjackson 15y agoThere is no Excel 2011 on Windows, so it pretty much has to be the Mac.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- snprbob86 15y agoYeah, just got it the other day. Haven't gotten to play with it much yet. The one thing I have noticed is that it still doesn't play nice with Spaces. It does not respect that I disabled the option for "When switching to an application, switch to a space with an open window for the application." Drives me nuts.
- awakeasleep 15y ago2011 still doesn't support external data sources.
- prpon 15y agoCan't find the 'pivot table' option from my account. They said they are rolling it out, any one else able to use it?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- Groxx 15y agoI've got it, though I don't really know how to use them yet.
- kenjackson 15y agoWhat are the data sources? Can I source from SQL Server, Oracle, DB2? OLAP engines? If not, while still better than nothing, not really a first class solution for most of my users. But great for soccer moms (seriously -- our team mom will flex on you with pivot tables for the soccer team).
- thesethings 15y agoYou can import public JSON/XML/CSV/HTML(and other) data. You can connect/import private stuff with the Secure Data Connector, though I don't know all the types supported. http://code.google.com/securedataconnector/docs/1.3/overview.html http://code.google.com/securedataconnector/docs/1.3/overview... You can get everything out w/the API, too.
- swaits 15y agoYah, it totally doesn't target the 0.1% of people who do this! HOW LAME IS GOOGLE WITH THEIR FREE-TO-USE SOFTWARE!?!?! In all seriousness, this is much more useful than to just soccer moms.
- systems 15y agopivot table is probably the most interesting interface to BI cubes, I've hardly seen them used elsewhere! so i can't really agree on your assumption that "other data sources" would represent 0.1%, in most business places i would say "other data sources" represent 100% of the usage
- skeletonjelly 15y agoFree online tools to do pivot tables on spreadsheet data. Sounds like small business to me. People who already have their data in spreadsheets and don't want to hire a BI engineer to install SQL, Analysis Services, construct cubes, reports etc etc
- lancewiggs 15y agoNot true at all. I could trade anecdotes but pivot tables are an essential tool in the analyst toolkit, without requiring external data. Great opportunity for someone to develop and share a standard spreadsheet for capturing and reporting usefully on iTunes appstore data.
- tantalor 15y agoWhen I interned at Google in 2006, one of my side projects was an all-JavaScript Pivot Table tool for internal analytics. I doubt any of that survived to present day, but it's nice to imagine.
- dr_win 15y agocongrats GDocs team!
- smackfu 15y agoI can't imagine how I used Excel before I learned pivot tables, and it still makes me appear fairly godlike to my co-workers.
- jungans 15y agoPlease please please add something like MS Project...
- DaveWAlbert 15y agoJust in case you didn't know there is an open source version: http://openproj.org/ http://openproj.org/
- melling 15y agoGoogle should create a turbo-charged version of Docs that requires Chrome, Firefox 4, or other sufficiently advanced browser. If Linux can boot in a browser, Google can make a much better spreadsheet for people on better browsers. Like Chrome, they can offer a different channel. It might even encourage people to install Firefox/Chrome.
- wladimir 15y agoAgreed; The spreadsheet is pretty nice already, but Docs is still an extremely limited word processor. I mean, lack of custom named styles, who can do without those? And there's more of those pretty straightforward features which even a simple wordpad application can do but not Docs.
- tomrod 15y agoAlmost ready for primetime. Keep up the good work Google.
- dbro 15y agoFor exploring data sets, Google's fusion tables are useful. https://sites.google.com/site/fusiontablestalks/ https://sites.google.com/site/fusiontablestalks/ some support for filtering and grouping 250MB data size limit nice mapping capabilities