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Google Sheets is a competitive answer to Microsoft’s hold on the non-OS software industry, and is definitely worth a closer look. Google Sheets’ spreadsheet software takes advantage of cloud storage, platform agnosticism, and collaborative editing in unique ways.
Features
- Run Anywhere on Anything – Spreadsheet applications have long been very platform-specific, because it simply doesn’t seem like something that would run well in a platform-agnostic environment such as Java or HTML5. Google Sheets’ browser-based design runs very smoothly in browsers across all systems. Google Sheets will run on any W3C-compliant web-enabled devices, from game consoles to smartphones and tablets, and even smart TVs. How ideal a device is depends entirely on how inconvenient it is to type in data and interact with the GUI.
- Collaboration – Share a spreadsheet across multiple workers simultaneously with real-time collaboration. Google’s approach to this has kind of defined how collaboration of this sort should work, and the lack of latency between users is actually quite impressive. You can see who is editing what, with color coding and user labels, and you have fantastic control over who has access, and to what degree.
- Automatic Save Saving one’s work frequently is critical. However, thanks to the cloud nature of the Google Sheets system, every change is automatically stored. While this sounds problematic if you want to revert to older versions, Google took that into account, and it does save the states of documents in series.
- Templates – Google Sheets offers a significant catalogue of templates comparable to Excel or other spreadsheet offerings—this also includes the ability to make, save, and share your own. Templates save a lot of time, and allow standard-compliance enforcement within a corporate culture, which is actually pretty important.
- Advanced Formatting – Are you used to the formatting tools in Excel? No problem, there, the interface of Google Sheets is spot-on to what you’ve been using for years, with mostly the same shortcut keys as well.
- Charts – Of course, no spreadsheet application is worth its salt unless it can make informative, beautiful charts. Google Sheets has this covered, and the process to create them is practically a 1:1 for how it’s done with other spreadsheet programs. You can of course share and collaborate with these charts just as easily as with the actual spreadsheets.
- Compatibility – Do you still need to be able to bring your work into Excel, or distribute xlsx files to clients? You can download the document as a number of standard formats that are completely lossless in their conversion.
- Add-Ons – Google is known for changing the way add-ons (or plugins/extensions) work. Google Sheets offers a host of add-ons for browsers, mobile devices, and within the application itself which can extend the functionality more or less without limit. The API is open, too, meaning anyone can easily develop custom extensions.
Pricing
Google’s office tools are completely, totally free. While their Drive cloud service has a corporate version with more space, which does cost money, they don’t hide any of the functionality of their applications behind paywalls. |
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