101–110 of 230 posts
"works offline" ... in Chrome only!
Google 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.
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The one thing that really annoys me is that they don't have a keyboard shortcut for adding a new row. Now I always have to 1) Shift space to select the current row 2) Press the "right-click" button the keyboard 3) Press the down arrow 4 times to select "Insert 1 above" 4) Press enter Or else I've to use the mouse, which is equally slow. It's really silly given that how often people insert rows.
Insert row is: 1) Shift + space (highlight current row) 2) alt + I (open insert menu) 3) r (insert row above) vs Excel which is: 1) Shift + space (highlight current row) 2) ctrl + shift + "+" (insert row above) Slightly different key pattern, but it does exist. Difference probably exist b/c ctrl + "+" is reserved in the browser for zoom.
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> 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. I've been using gmail for almost 10 years. I liked it from the start. But it's getting worse, not better. It's extremely slow compared to what I'm used to with Exchange and Outlook, and navigating around is more of a chore. How do…
Gmail UI sucks in part because they are going for the masses, not the power user. It isn't HTML5's fault.
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It 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.
Why? If you can get your data out as CSV? How are you locked in at all, or at least, any more than with Microsoft? p.s. According to a sheet I have saved I can download my info as: .xlsx .ods (OpenDocument Format) .pdf .csv .txt .html
If you could export all your documents in the native format and import them into LibreOffice you'd still lose features, but as LibreOffice improved it's import you'd lose less.
With convert at export data is permanently lost. With convert at import, no data lost permanently lost, it just may not be currently available.
Also if you could backup in native format you could import into a google account if your first account is blocked/lost, instead you have to go through the import/export conversion twice.
Also, with Excel, once you have a computer running Windows / Excel, you can't lose data if a feature is changed / dropped. Just don't upgrade. With Google Docs, you have no choice to upgrade to the latest version. It may not even be a dropped feature, you spreadsheets may accidentally rely on a buggy feature, and when it's fixed your spreadsheets behave differently with no warning.
Am 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 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).
Conditional 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.
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…
These are differences in the web UX paradigm, not differences in the capabilities of the technology. If Google wanted to build a web app "for people who were used to native apps," it could work and act exactly like this.
In fact, web apps built to work inside native-app containers (Adobe Air, node-webkit, etc.) frequently do do this, and it's quite hard to tell that the result is a web-app at all. See, for example, Light Table.
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I would agree with you that excel is still more powerful than google spreadsheet but I don't agree that's because of native vs web type of app, because gmail is more powerful (and faster) than outlook. So let's call it subjective and give it a rest. The main reason we switched to google apps is collaboration: all the features in the world do not really matter when the whole team can open and edit a document at the sa…
How is Gmail faster than Outlook? I've used both for as long as they've existed, and both for work and personal use, and don't see where or how Gmail is faster. Not going to bother with the more powerful comment. This being HN and all I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're simply not familiar enough with Outlook, rather than trolling.
Disclaimer: I don't have as much experience with Outlook as I do with Gmail. And it could very likely have been the backend at my last place.
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> 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. I've been using gmail for almost 10 years. I liked it from the start. But it's getting worse, not better. It's extremely slow compared to what I'm used to with Exchange and Outlook, and navigating around is more of a chore. How do…
Gmail UI sucks in part because they are going for the masses, not the power user. It isn't HTML5's fault.