Real hackers use sc or ethercalc anyway =]
New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline
71–80 of 230 posts
Re: New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline
#72I'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 t…
I 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 reg…
So, 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.
Re: New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline
#73I'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 t…
As a power-excel user I agree with you that Sheets isn't quite there yet. Trying to use the same shortcut keys that I'm used to often makes me want to bang my head against a wall, either because they don't work at all or because even if they do, it's not as responsive.
However, the pace of improvement is one that I think you should definitely consider before saying "never." Excel hasn't fundamentally changed for me since 2003 (outside of being able to more easily handle larger datasets from 65K+), so it seems like a fixed target while sheets continues to move closer (still with large gaps ahead!).
If I need to do financial modeling, I'll likely continue to use excel. However, for many low-touch projects, I've almost completely switched over to sheets, which wasn't the case even a year ago.
Re: New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Using a native rich application is always going to be superior to building a web app on top of a browser. Always? You think that will be true 20 years from now?
People forget that you used to boot your PC into a game disk to play a game. When people started playing games in Windows (full-screen), people like the grandparent poster would RAIL that booting to a game disk would always be superior to building a game on top of Windows.
We still have consoles, which get much better performance for the given hardware. True they can't compete with desktops even with the inefficiencies built in, but that is not relevant.
The web faces fundamental limitations as long as it is built on the current architecture of JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. Windows, being a general purpose OS like Linux, has far less restrictions.
Re: New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline
#75Am 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.
I 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 :-)
Re: New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline
#76I'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 t…
They (Google Apps, and Office) are different. People who cannot take the time to adapt to different will always find the 'other' system inferior to the one they know.
Re: New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
The $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.
> 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.
The 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.
Re: New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline
#78I 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)?
Re: New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use MS Office occasionally at work but even that small amount of usage has me wanting to use Google Docs instead. -Someone has the Excel file open on the network? Oh, read-only for you my friend. Have to save? Better track down whoever has it open. -No revision/change tracking. Have to always be alert as to who is changing what and when. Often simpler just to make a new file and add to the clutter on the network fo…
You're doing it wrong. sharepoint/svn avoids these issues.
Isn't that just another point in his favor? It's easy to say "you're doing it wrong, just learn how to use these other technologies so Office works correctly", but most users would obviously prefer a product where "doing it right" is the default behavior. I'm speaking of course only with respect to the feature being discussed here (collaborative editing); I don't have much of an opinion on Office vs Drive overall.
Re: New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline
#80I'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.