Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

googledrive.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 230 posts

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

#191

Post by motti »

wodenokoto wrote: post #56
azakai wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'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.

While 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).

Google 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....).

Spreadsheets had (view-only) offline capability via Gears as far back as 2008 (see 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-ht...) and are presumably using here (or the alternative FileSystem API - 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).

* Firefox doesn't handle the no-store directive well

* Chrome Apps can be granted unlimited storage (https://developers.google.com/chrome/whitepapers/storage#unl...)

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

#192

Post by e12e »

Double_Cast wrote: post #114
yan wrote: post #37

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 propose Gcell for slang. It's quicker, analogous to Gmail , and vaguely reminiscent of Excel .

But is it fast enough to warrant the name gazelle?

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

#193

Post by fphhotchips »

jodrellblank wrote: post #172
kyrra wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went from a fully MS Office company, to a different company that used Google Apps, which was recently bought by another company that uses MS Office (that we are now moving to). I've had extensive experience with both products at this point. ===Outlook vs Gmail=== Outlook has a lot of things going for it. One of my main complaints is the functionality difference between the PC and OSX versions of Outlook. Outlook on…

=== Word vs Docs === I'd say the only way Google wins in this is collaboration. Being able to work on the same document with multiple people at the same time is such an amazing feature, I'm sad to lose it. You can collaboratively edit Word documents in Word 2010 and SharePoint: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/video-coauthorin... Also works in OneNote. OneNote can do it without SharePoint, I don't know whe…

Office 365 Word does it without the need for SharePoint (both in the Word web interface and the Desktop app). It's terrible, I can't recommend it. The number of crashes and sync-losses we had was ridiculous.

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

#194

Post by jeffgreco »

yan wrote: post #37

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.

Yeah, it makes more sense than "Excel" to me.

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

#195

Post by sondh »

I 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!

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

#196

Post by arthur_debert »

millstone wrote: post #181
bhouston wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail UI sucks in part because they are going for the masses, not the power user. It isn't HTML5's fault.

A lot of it is due to the limitations of HTML. For example, HTML is why Gmail paginates about as well as PHP app from 1998, instead of allowing you to just scroll through all of them like a native client.

Pagination does have it's advantages, namely: - Linking - Easier to grok where you are in the result set ( 3 out of 5 instead of the scroll bar that changes height)

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

#197

Post by MRSallee »

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.

Depends on how you define "superior."

Word has a lot more features that Google Documents, but if I don't need them...

Personally, I am more than happy to use Google Docs over MS software. Google stuff doesn't take 45 seconds to load. Formatting rarely goes awry. It has the features need. I can access docs from anywhere and share with anyone and they don't have to install anything or even load an application to view it.

I do not miss using MS Office one bit.

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

#198

Post by gum_ina_package »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #129
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'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. Sysadmin here. How much are you willing to pay? I'll need at least 2 domain servers, exchange server, backup server/device/nas/tapes, etc to give you a stable and recoverable environment. I'll need an air conditioned server room/closet as well and a decent UPS. We'll need to pay for offs…

Why wouldn't you just signup for Office 365 and literally have every problem you mentioned go away?

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

#199

Post by K_REY_C »

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've had the opposite experience while working with a company of <200 employees and several locations needing to have a set of communication tools to efficiently collaborate in real time. We're using the query functionality in Google spreadsheets to automatically parse data input by a variety of staff through Google forms for meetings gathering people often through Google hangouts. We're also able to make instantaneous and ubiquitous changes to training documents, policies, and other items (e.g. procedures) without worrying about versioning or if an old photocopy of a policy is still be used. I can't speak highly enough Google apps in this type of environment. We seriously considered Office 365 (which seems to focus almost entirely on getting you back to the desktop) but the inability to real-time collaborate on documents (at least at the time) was the first of many strikes against that suite as a viable option. YMMV depending on what you need to do, but for fast-paced collaborative work I can't imagine working without Google apps.

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

#200

Post by ams6110 »

csmuk wrote: post #159
xhrpost wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We have many non technical users doing just fine with TortoiseSVN on windows... If it's a command line app they'd be lost so that might be the basis of your argument.

So you have users editing Office documents and committing changes to SVN and you don't get conflicts? Or if you do, they are able to resolve them?
Post reply on HN