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New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline

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Re: New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline

#81

Post by SonicSoul »

gdulli wrote: post #24

I'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…

care to elaborate what things you're missing? I'm using Outlook/Exchange at work and find it extremely painful to work with. in Gmail i can get everything accomplished w/out using a mouse, it's really easy to label and go to labels, perform advanced searches sand easily create filters out of those. I'm using some Outlook plugins (i.e. ClearSight) to ease the pain but those have problems of their own. Even silly things like replying to an email in "sent" folder to include my previous response, Outlook defaults to replying to me so i have to "reply to all" and manually remove myself.. where as in gmail i can just hit "a" or "r" and it will know what i'm trying to do .. it's quite beautiful when you utilize more of the keyboard shortcuts.

Re: New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline

#82

Post by jonthn »

cglee wrote: post #49
gdulli wrote: post #24

I'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…

This is how a disruptive technology starts. Google Apps doesn't have to be better, but the idea is that one day, you'll find Google Apps "good enough", with all the benefits of being online (and now offline, too). You're just on the higher end of the power-user curve, but your "good enough" day is approaching.

Exactly.

Re: New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline

#83

Post by asah »

Google 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

Re: New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline

#85

Post by gdulli »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #76
gdulli wrote: post #24

I'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.

That's very specious to claim that's why someone would disagree with you, but I didn't have an opinion about Google Apps at first. It was only after spending a year using it and learning its differences and limitations that I thought it was inferior. As a software developer for 15+ years, learning new applications is not a difficult thing.

Re: New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline

#86

Post by dkl »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #76
gdulli wrote: post #24

I'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.

Google spreadsheets lacks basic features. Like selecting multiple, dis contiguous cells or rows/columns.

Re: New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline

#87

Post by gdulli »

oftenwrong wrote: post #52
gdulli wrote: post #24

I'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…

>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?

In 20 years I predict I'll still prefer executing code at the local OS level to thin client code hosted within an application running in the local OS. And having the application state updated after accessing local memory rather than after communicating across a network. We don't have to wait 20 years to experience the benefits of hosted applications, we have them today. And they sounded good to me. But after enjoying those benefits, I'd still give them up for the reliability and responsiveness of native applications.

Re: New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline

#88

Post by bane »

gdulli wrote: post #24

I'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'm also at a company that's a 100% Google Apps and so have been forced to make a good go at it.

- Gmail is great for near-term communications, having chat in the same place makes it a nice communications hub for immediate and near-term communications. I like it better than Outlook and it seems much snappier in day-to-day use.

But I find it almost unusable when looking for emails from a while ago. It's so bad that I connect to my mailbox with Thunderbird and use Thunderbird's search to find anything. The problem is with the threaded conversations, I'll get search results, with the result buried somewhere in 1 of a 100 different emails in the conversation and as far as I know there's no easy way to sort through that pile.

- Calendar is actually pretty good. For my use as good as Outlook. It integrates nicely with Gmail and gets the job done. It's also pretty snappy in day-to-day.

- Document is okay for very simple things. Collaboration is a killer feature. But it's missing many of the things that makes Word superior. It's bad enough that people in my company who interact with anybody outside of the company are on the list for a personal MS-Office license...pretty much just for Word. The review functions (comments, change tracking etc.) in Word is absolutely needed if you work on any kind of contract/proposal paperwork. I find that I quickly exceed the formatting abilities of of the web app without getting into anything too fancy.

- Sheets is also okay for very simple things. However, my accounting department sends me a pretty simple traditional spreadsheet showing timetracking for my staff and it's totally unviewable in the web app. I'd rather just use the web app then firing up Excel, but I simply can't.

- I don't think I've ever bothered with the presentation app or anything else in the suite, but that's all I really need to use. TBH, it's actually a pretty nice suite that gets me about 70% where I need to be. However, all our internal tracking tools (Atlassian tools) really want documents instead of links to shared on-line docs so you end up importing/exporting everything as word docs anyways.

but I have to say I think that this (2nd, 3rd?) rewrite of sheets looks really good. I'm going to try it out the next time I need to deal with staff time.

Re: New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline

#89

Post by psbp »

cglee wrote: post #49
gdulli wrote: post #24

I'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…

This is how a disruptive technology starts. Google Apps doesn't have to be better, but the idea is that one day, you'll find Google Apps "good enough", with all the benefits of being online (and now offline, too). You're just on the higher end of the power-user curve, but your "good enough" day is approaching.

I'm not sure why we give so much credence to legacy users complaining about new software (tech in general). Specific use cases are either adaptable or they'll work their way into the new whatever as demand grows. For example, I never dreamed of using my iPad w/ usb keyboard as a laptop replacement. It's not perfect, but it's rapidly becoming my preferable method of computing when I'm not at home.

Re: New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline

#90

Post by xhrpost »

wutbrodo wrote: post #79
csmuk wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly, not everyone using these files are coders or computer savvy enough to tolerate SVN or GIT.
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