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New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline
- discardorama 13y ago"works offline" ... in Chrome only!
- oinksoft 13y agoNot so different from features that only worked with Google Gears before, Chrome essentially being Gears, matured.
- azakai 13y agoIt's been years and still Google only implements offline mode in docs for Chrome? This looks shameful, but perhaps there is some reason that Google people reading HN can explain? From what I can tell this requires a Chrome app from the Chrome Web Store. So it is not standard HTML5 stuff. Does Google intend to fully support non-Chrome browsers? This behavior seems to show otherwise.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- wodenokoto 13y agoWhile it is hard to say what Google expects to do or not to do, it does seem like Google are building an app platform on Chrome in parallel to the so called web app platform (HTML5 + Javascript).
- jebblue 13y agoWith DART and Go and Google Fiber, all one company. It kind of worries me to be honest. Overall though as long as Larry and Sergei are there it should be OK I think.
- motti 13y agoGoogle originally pioneered Gears as a way to get webapps to work offline (at a time when HTML5 was still being hashed out by WHATWG) and tried to get it adopted as an open standard (http://gearsblog.blogspot.co.uk/2008/04/gears-and-standards.html http://gearsblog.blogspot.co.uk/2008/04/gears-and-standards....). Spreadsheets had (view-only) offline capability via Gears as far back as 2008 (see http://googledocs.blogspot.co.uk/2008/04/view-your-presentations-and.html http://googledocs.blogspot.co.uk/2008/04/view-your-presentat...) but this was then discontinued in favour of the standards methods. FWIW, they have been helping with the HTML5 storage APIs from the beginning. The HTML5 way of doing offline is AppCache, which Google have used for other products (http://googlecode.blogspot.co.uk/2009/04/gmail-for-mobile-html5-series-using.html http://googlecode.blogspot.co.uk/2009/04/gmail-for-mobile-ht...) and are presumably using here (or the alternative FileSystem API - http://dev.w3.org/2009/dap/file-system/pub/FileSystem/ http://dev.w3.org/2009/dap/file-system/pub/FileSystem/). I suspect the Chrome-only limitation is due to the differences in the way is currently implemented, for instance: * Until Firefox 26's release yesterday, it would prompt for each site that wanted to use AppCache (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6881368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6881368). * Firefox doesn't handle the no-store directive well * Chrome Apps can be granted unlimited storage (https://developers.google.com/chrome/whitepapers/storage#unlimited https://developers.google.com/chrome/whitepapers/storage#unl...)
- azakai 13y agoIf it worked in Chrome outside of the store, it would be more plausible. But requiring the Chrome Store seems to indicate it is not using just standard HTML5 stuff like appCache. The issue of limited storage or not seems insufficient to explain this. Very disappointing.
- sockgrant 13y agoGoogle can't force other browsers to implement features. If it's only available for Chrome, it is possible that the features they need are not available elsewhere.
- loceng 13y agoBeen hoping for this for a long time. Happy it's here.
- jonthn 13y agoWhy would anyone use Excel now?
- cobrausn 13y agoMaybe because not everyone wants their spreadsheet with sensitive data on Google's servers. Also, I seriously doubt this thing is up to feature parity with Excel.
- g8oz 13y agoAs far as desktop clients go, what does Excel have that Gnumeric or LibreOffice Calc don't? Not including inertia.
- localhost 13y agoBecause Excel is the backbone of how most organizations do "computation". For example, if you look at any financial services company, you will find not only Excel everywhere, but tons of VBA code in those spreadsheets which also turn around and talk to various compute clusters that they use (both Windows HPC server and LOTS of Linux). Excel isn't going away anytime soon.
- bigchewy 13y agopower users. it's faster and has shortcuts that everyone has memorized.
- uptown 13y agoprivacy
- bjg 13y agoWell, there's power pivot[0]. [0] http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bi/powerpivot.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bi/powerpivot.aspx
- antr 13y agohaving worked at a multinational for some years where excel was the bread and butter: privacy, power features (e.g. tables, goal seek, etc), and custom-built (corporate) plugins are the three biggest reasons I can think off.
- oshineye 13y agoIt's still proprietary software. Why would I use this instead of Libreoffice?
- Pxtl 13y agoBecause web? Can I open my LibreOffice documents from a new machine without even installing an app? Obviously there are reasons to use LibreOffice, like you said. But don't try to pretend there's no reason to use Google's office suite over LibreOffice.
- icebraining 13y ago"Beginning with Version 3.5 LibreOffice can be launched as a web server. This allows using LibreOffice online within a web browser." https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Using_LibreOffice_in_a_Web_Browser https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Using_LibreOffice_in_a_W...
- FigBug 13y agoIt is convenient. But I am surprised so many people are willing to put their business's data into a spreadsheet where they can't even get the native files. If this takes off it's going to be lock in 100x worse than Excel ever was.
- DominikR 13y agoYou can export Google spreadsheets in multiple formats (Microsoft Excel, OpenDocument format and so on)
- justinsb 13y agoOffline is awesome; obviously because it means it works anywhere, but also I presume this means that all formula evaluation is now done locally, i.e. "instantly". I am pretty sure that before the server was involved in (some?) recalculation, which caused sluggishness.
- FigBug 13y agoI still find it bizarre that the actual files still aren't synced in the google drive desktop app. Instead they are synced and stored in the browser. I'm assuming this means you have to go into the browser and get the latest versions before you go offline, rather than the desktop app keeping you in sync. The desktop app really feels neglected, like it's a checkbox feature to compete with Dropbox.
- chaz 13y agoI suspect it's designed that way to work with Chrome OS.
- dragonwriter 13y ago> I still find it bizarre that the actual files still aren't synced in the google drive desktop app. I suspect one of the reasons for that is that the native storage isn't a file format at all, and that all of a users sheets (and other files for the Google apps) are stored in a set of entries in an online database. > The desktop app really feels neglected, like it's a checkbox feature to compete with Dropbox. The ability to store traditional files in Drive and access them through the same web UI is a feature that was added, I suspect, to make the Drive interface usable as a one-stop browser-based information access point (a "My documents" for Chromebooks, in a sense), and the desktop app is a feature that provides syncing to encourage people to store desktop files in a way which also makes them readily accessible to that interface, as well as a me too feature to compete with Dropbox.
- FigBug 13y ago> I suspect one of the reasons for that is that the native storage isn't a file format at all, and that all of a users sheets (and other files for the Google apps) are stored in a set of entries in an online database. If the DB entries can be duplicated to the users browser, then they could be serialized to a file in the users google drive. This would allow people to back up their files, move files out of google drive when it gets full and move them back in when they need them. That guy that lost all his files a few months ago would have been ok. I can't see a good reason the .gsheet files are just bookmarks. I want my files. Also, if somebody from Google is reading this, please add a reconnect option to Google drive. Exiting and re-running drive is a pain after every network failure, hibernation, etc.
- tartehk 13y agoSpreadsheets have pretty much been the same for the past 10 years so it's good to finally see some movement in this area. For a time being, I was sure that Google gave up on spreadsheets.
- gabriel34 13y agoSo, is this a move against Microsoft?
- robododo 13y agoDefinitely. Though I often wonder how much Google's apps strategy is a direct-compete with office for now? I have a sneaking suspicion it's similar to Microsoft's Bing strategy. It feels like Bing was created to annoy Google and keep them focused on search. Microsoft could afford to throw a few billion at something to keep Google out of it's bread-and-butter. It feels like Google's doing the same with apps. Of course, given enough time to gain feature parity, both GApps and Bing could be true competitors.
- mortenjorck 13y agoGood to see filtering is finally a client-only action. It always struck me as strange that what was effectively a view change (on the order of scrolling through the document or changing the active page) propagated to other collaborators.
- goler 13y agoand Paste Transpose!
- gdulli 13y agoI'm at my first company that uses Google apps and it's been a bad experience. There's so much about email and calendaring that Outlook/Exchange got right that it's hard to be without it after taking it for granted. Using a native rich application is always going to be superior to building a web app on top of a browser. Once you're used to real applications, Gmail and the other apps aren't suitable for anything more than light usage. It's not just the features that are missing, it's UI responsiveness and usability. Hosting an application inside a browser is so awkward in ways that real applications aren't. I can't assume I can right click and get anything useful, I don't know if I'm going to get the browser's menu or the app's. The concept of a consistent menu bar you can access with hotkeys is gone. Online/offline will never be seamless and consistent across apps. And the input lag is intolerable. Having all of my documents stored centrally is a real, but small, convenience to get in exchange for everything that's given up. And as far as cost goes, I'd prefer that any money my company might be saving be deducted from my paycheck if it would mean they'd get off of Google apps.
- mierle 13y agoI recently went through an acquisition where we transitioned from Google Apps to the Microsoft suite. I do not share your love of Microsoft's suite. Among the many problems I have with the Microsoft suite, Outlook is at the top of my list for generating the most frustration. GMail's priority inbox and new-style inbox where machine learning is used to sort out mail is a productivity booster for me. With Outlook, I regularly lose important mail because it is buried under the difficult to filter masses of other email. I could go on about how the lack of robust collaboration facilities are a direct time waster for my team, but I don't want to hijack this thread further...
- freyr 13y agoSo, we all like what we're used to. To the OP, insisting that apps running in browsers will never match native apps in terms of UX, that's a very audacious claim. There are many powerful, competent, and well-funded entities with a vested interest in improving the web app experience (including Google). I wouldn't claim they're doomed from the start. This could be just another example of a disruptive technology, that's initially lacking in certain conventional metrics, but has a lot of room for improvement above and beyond the entrenched competition.
- r00fus 13y agoConditional Formatting is a huge win. The lack of this feature kept me using Excel when my collaborators complained about stale status colors. I'll have to give it a test drive again soon.
- mikegioia 13y agoI've been using conditional formatting for over a year. It was pretty buried in the options though.
- nailer 13y agoCan we insert rows normally now? In a discoverable, intuitive way, like Edit -> Insert rows used in every other spreadsheet ever? Currently the solution is this: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/44684?hl=en https://support.google.com/drive/answer/44684?hl=en Eg, to add 30 rows, select 30 random rows, no matter what they are, as long as your selection is 30 high. Then you right click the row area, you get the option to insert 30 rows. Who does UX for these products? Surely this didn't test well?
- actionscripted 13y agoHave you tried it? You select N rows, it then says Insert > N Rows Above and Insert > N Rows Below. I've never had any problems inserting rows, but perhaps I'm not using the product the way others do.
- nailer 13y agoYes, evidently I have. The idea of selecting existing content in order to get the option to add space for new content is very, very odd. Did you really discover how to do this without looking it up?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- hnal943 13y agoHonestly, it never occurred to me to do it any other way.
- actionscripted 13y agoI didn't look it up at all. Took me a few seconds initially to acclimate to the UI, find the "Insert" menu and try a couple things. I don't feel like their methods for inserting make perfect sense, but I've never had a problem with it.
- Pxtl 13y agoI agree that selecting rows via the column headers makes sense a one way to insert N rows, but having a general Insert context menu for unselected usage would also be helpful.
- callesgg 13y agoSome really nice stuff however.... Still no zooming.
- jessaustin 13y agoMaybe I'm misunderstanding... does <ctrl>-<plus> not work for you?
- callesgg 13y agoThat zoom's all the Buttons aswell.
- csmuk 13y agoFed up of all the Google Docs fanfare... Excel features... fast - check. Powerful - check. Works offline - check. Let's get a little closer to google docs... Works online - check. Edit in browser - check. Edit on mobile device - check. Share with other people - check. Cheap - check (o365 sub is really cheap per seat). Can customise the UI - check. Can deal with huge sheets - check. Can extend, script etc - check. Google docs buys me nothing.
- sheetjs 13y agoThe $0 Google Docs is correctly priced for what it offers: spreadsheet functionality for the lower 80% of the market that doesn't use advanced features and most likely wouldn't pay for a solution
- csmuk 13y agoThe $0 skydrive facility (gives you Excel, PowerPoint, Word) is the same on the MS side of things. Hell even a WP8 handset with office is $80 now. If you want to pay for it you get a crap load more from O365.
- DominikR 13y ago> If you want to pay for it you get a crap load more from O365. Might be true, but Google Docs has more than enough features for me so I'm not going to pay for O365. And I am surely not going to use a WP8 handset as long as the ecosystem is so poor compared to Apple's App Store/Google Play.
- csmuk 13y agoThe ecosystem was poor. It's pretty good now. In fact Nokia HERE is a killer that wipes the floor with all other platforms. Who the hell needs 100,000 iOS fart apps anyway.
- staticfish 13y ago
- yan 13y agoAm I the only one that is distracted by the name "Google Sheets?" It doesn't exactly roll of the tongue, awkward to say and doesn't exactly scream "spreadsheets" when placed next to other Google Docs (Drive?) products. It can just as easily have been a presentation tool, or something else entirely. Although, it's probably ambiguous only to me and for most other people, sheets == spreadsheets.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoI did think "Hmm, Google going into Bed, Bath, & Beyond? Or maybe a flexible display you sleep under?" But no such luck[1] :-) I agree with you that 'naming' is not a strong suit here. [1] I'm sure one segment of the Internet could find a use for a bed sheet that was also a display :-)
- magicalist 13y agoHa, no you aren't. Has it always been called that? My first reaction to the submission title was "what in the world is google sheets?" I almost always use the word processing part of Docs, and maybe 10% spreadsheets (and maybe like .5% presentations), but I guess I just always refer to "google docs", saying "make a spreadsheet in docs" if I have to be more specific (or "in drive", though I'm still resisting that for going less descriptive of what I actually do with it with the new name).
- Double_Cast 13y agoI propose Gcell for slang. It's quicker, analogous to Gmail, and vaguely reminiscent of Excel.
- andrewflnr 13y agoIIRC they're trying to avoid GStuff-type names.
- e12e 13y agoBut is it fast enough to warrant the name gazelle?
- skeletonjelly 13y ago
- wudf 13y agoBig fan of gdocs here. Some of the new functions are going to really be great. My only complaint is the display changes. The default row size has increased to 21 from 17 and size 10 font no longer fits in a 17 pixel row. The best option now is size 9 font on 19 pixel rows. It may seem nitpicky, but when I design a spreadsheet, I use a lot of screenspace and this really adds up.
- genericacct 13y agoReal hackers use sc or ethercalc anyway =]
- sondh 13y agoI really appreciate the performance boost. We have a quite complicated sheet before and adding 20 more rows at a time is annoying. Yes I know there are ways to add 20+ but the default low limit shows how slow it is. With this new system, Google is confident enough to allow user to add 1000 rows at a time (default value). Scrolling seems to be very smooth too. Overall a great upgrade!
- jcampbell1 13y agoAs an ex-excel power user, this is a huge step in the right direction. F4/F2 now seem to work. Unfortunately there is no way to turn of editing directly in cells. There are strange bugs like auto column sizing doesn't work correctly. Merging cells is a cancer, it would be nice if the drop down offered centering across selection. While this is still not Excel for windows, it feels better than Excel on the Mac. I think I will start using it.
- rajat 13y agoI am curious: are documents in Google Sheet scanned by Google's software bots to determine stuff about me? I can't seem to find a Privacy Policy document specific to documents in Google docs. How about if I pay for the service (can I pay for the service)?
- georgewfraser 13y agoI'm skeptical of the claim that it's more powerful. Running a simple performance test, 10,000 formulas of the form: B1=MOD(A1+32,1000) re-evaluation takes about a second, which is slightly slower than the old version. For reference, Excel can do 1,000,000 of these formulas, significantly faster.
- asah 13y agoGoogle Spreadsheets is VB/DBase/FoxPro for the web and like them, you can build a nice-sized product or company and upgrade to a "real" database for the tables you need, e.g. enterprise search on SOLR/Lucene. Specifically, you get super flexible, shareable, cheap cloud database with built-in UI, APIs, version and access control and more. Little or no training required. My company has over 3,000 sheets (7,500+ worksheets) and over 100 "types" of tables. Compared with companies that used traditional RDBMS+app architectures, we've saved big $ between data entry and engineering. It allowed us to skip VC financing and win our market bootstrapping to profitability. hope this helps, adam world's leading source for specialty/artisan products bbfdirect.com get office snacks! bbfdirect.com/office-snacks
- dkl 13y agoCan you select multiple, discontiguous cells or columns or rows yet?? That's the thing that kills me that is not implemented.
- martinpw 13y agoNo, it is still not there. First thing I tried. :-(
- newrui 13y agoDo feeds still work like they used to via the same APIs? I'm not able to get a json feed out via a link like before for some reason.
- robinhowlett 13y agoI'm also seeing a nice change to using custom formulas/scripts. Normally when I return a 2D array, most of the grid is results from the CONTINUE function - now it writes the actual cell value calculated. This is a lot nicer for then sorting this data.
- scrumper 13y agoGood spot - this is much better. I have to copy & paste values from CONTINUE cells now otherwise sorting is completely broken.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- amorphid 13y agoI have tried multiple times to use Outlook and Exchange based email, most recently a couple months ago. I do not like it. At all. If I was offered a job that forced me to use Outlook, I'd probably turn it down (or bribe IT to make my email accessible through Gmail). For all of it's flaws, I frikkin' love Gmail. Perhaps my favorite parts are the spam filtering and the filters.
- tobyjsullivan 13y agoI am excited about this to a very unnerving degree. Perhaps I should have been an accountant.
- scrumper 13y agoI'll be excited if: - I can explicitly name and lock a given version (i.e. a checkpoint). This is a huge missing feature at my company, where we rely on collaboratively-edited spreadsheets - I can select non-contiguous cells - I can insert multiple rows easily - I can copy formulas into Excel
- freefrancisco 13y agoCan they finally let me select groups of cells that are not adjacent to each other for charts?
- g8oz 13y agoPersonally I'm more interested in projects like Webodf (http://webodf.org/ http://webodf.org/) and it's integration with OwnCloud 6 (http://owncloud.org/ http://owncloud.org/). Stick it on a Synology NAS at home and I've got my own office suite in the cloud.
- L3monPi3 13y agoI just activated the new sheets, create a new sheet and could't edit it offline :S
- gcanyon 13y agoI've used ms office and google apps for years. For lightweight day to day use, google, hands down. Nearly every document I create is shared, and MS as of a few years back doesn't compare. I haven't tried the new office. For serious spreadsheet work with layout requirements, Numbers, easy. Yes, Numbers. For super-serious something or other I hear Excel is unbeatable, but I don't know what functions Excel has that google doesn't, let alone Numbers, and Numbers has the one feature every spreadsheet should have and almost none do (certainly not excel/google): allow two sheets on a single page. How often do you have to juggle column widths/cell merges to get different layouts in two parts of your worksheet? No more! With Numbers you can draw out multiple separate sheets, each with their own column widths/row heights and other formatting, no problem. And for large data sets, or data that requires extensive filtering or specialized presentation, FileMaker, no question. It blows all spreadsheets away when it comes to: hundreds of thousands of rows (or millions), and it supports limitless separate views of the same data. Anyone who does serious work in excel that includes large data, normalize-able data, or extensive presentation or filtering, you owe it to yourself to check out FileMaker.
- dav-id 13y agoRecently I have been working on a project with a client where we have been using SkyDrive and its online Excel for simple and basic collaboration on a few documents. The thing that I love about this setup is having the original Excel document sat there on the skydrive ready to be edited in the full Excel when more advanced editing is required and seamlessly updated on the web (although not at the same time, which is something I hope will be possible in the future).
- pconf 13y agoI don't use Google docs/sheets/gmail/... due to their terms of service. Why give Google a perpetual right to do anything they want with any content put in a Google app? https://www.google.com/google-d-s/terms.html https://www.google.com/google-d-s/terms.html