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The UI of Google spreadsheet works much better than Excel (not to mention OpenOffice). No such nonsense as, for example, you can only paste something you copied

The UI of Google spreadsheet works much better than Excel (not to mention OpenOffice). No such nonsense as, for example, you can only paste something you copied once. The reason Google Spreadsheet hasn't taken off is lack of investment on Google's part, which is needed because from what I understand from some Google's devs comments, it is a right mess under the bonnet. We can only guess why Google haven't invested in it, maybe they don't believe people are willing to share their private or corporate data with Google's, or they think the potential for disaster is too high. But I believe the potential is there

tanzam75 13y ago
> The UI of Google spreadsheet works much better than Excel (not to mention OpenOffice). No such nonsense as, for example, you can only paste something you copied once. I'm not seeing this. You can indeed paste from the clipboard multiple times in Excel. I just tried this, and it works fine in both Excel 2013 and the Excel web app.
- kubiiii 13y ago
  Yes but you can't paste anymore if you do anything else between copying and pasting. On 2010 at least.
brudgers 13y ago
The reason I've been thinking about spreadsheets is because of the potential. I suspect the reason for Google's lack of investment is the degree of difficulty which it takes to develop a spreadsheet that can compete with Excel on something other than price. The world is littered with trivial attempts at spreadsheets, from Emacs org-mode tables and calc-mode to Common-Lisp's Cells project to Scheme-in-a-grid. As I skim and wade and slog about Knuth's Semi-Numerical Algorithms, I get the feeling that any useful spreadsheet is probably going to have a bit of the "Electric components by Lucas" about it in order to bash a numerical implementation sufficiently to meet the reasonable expectations of real world non-programmer end-users. You won't get far with the CEO of a Fortune 500 corporation by saying, "Sometimes addition and multiplication are non-associative, so be sure to avoid cumulative rounding errors." Pasting: See Office Clipboard. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/copy-and-paste-multiple-items-by-using-the-office-clipboard-HA010163602.aspx http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/copy-and-paste-m...

tanzam75 13y ago

> The UI of Google spreadsheet works much better than Excel (not to mention OpenOffice). No such nonsense as, for example, you can only paste something you copied once. I'm not seeing this. You can indeed paste from the clipboard multiple times in Excel. I just tried this, and it works fine in both Excel 2013 and the Excel web app.

kubiiii 13y ago
Yes but you can't paste anymore if you do anything else between copying and pasting. On 2010 at least.

brudgers 13y ago

The reason I've been thinking about spreadsheets is because of the potential. I suspect the reason for Google's lack of investment is the degree of difficulty which it takes to develop a spreadsheet that can compete with Excel on something other than price. The world is littered with trivial attempts at spreadsheets, from Emacs org-mode tables and calc-mode to Common-Lisp's Cells project to Scheme-in-a-grid. As I skim and wade and slog about Knuth's Semi-Numerical Algorithms, I get the feeling that any useful spreadsheet is probably going to have a bit of the "Electric components by Lucas" about it in order to bash a numerical implementation sufficiently to meet the reasonable expectations of real world non-programmer end-users. You won't get far with the CEO of a Fortune 500 corporation by saying, "Sometimes addition and multiplication are non-associative, so be sure to avoid cumulative rounding errors." Pasting: See Office Clipboard. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/copy-and-paste-multiple-items-by-using-the-office-clipboard-HA010163602.aspx http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/copy-and-paste-m...