5 ms·

This 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 i

• pasbesoin 15y ago
  From 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 ago
    Collaboration 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 ago
      So 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 ago
    Case 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 ago
  According 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 ago
    By no means is 400,000 cells a "big dataset". I would put the dividing line somewhere near 2 million rows.
    • arvindn 15y ago
      Disclaimer: 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 ago
        I 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 ago
    huge electrical bills.
    • bigiain 15y ago
      Yeah, 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!'"