New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by ams6110 » Thu, Dec 12, 2013, 4:42 AM UTC

greenburger wrote: post #108

Spearchucker wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At my last job I used Outlook and was very frustrated by the speed of searching my mail. Outlook seemed to take ages; Gmail on the other hand excels at searching. 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.

Outlook search is useless. You might as well just scroll through your messages by eye.

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

#202

Post by gcanyon » Thu, Dec 12, 2013, 5:01 AM UTC

I've used ms office and google apps for years. For lightweight day to day use, google, hands down. Nearly every document I create is shared, and MS as of a few years back doesn't compare. I haven't tried the new office.

For serious spreadsheet work with layout requirements, Numbers, easy. Yes, Numbers. For super-serious something or other I hear Excel is unbeatable, but I don't know what functions Excel has that google doesn't, let alone Numbers, and Numbers has the one feature every spreadsheet should have and almost none do (certainly not excel/google): allow two sheets on a single page. How often do you have to juggle column widths/cell merges to get different layouts in two parts of your worksheet? No more! With Numbers you can draw out multiple separate sheets, each with their own column widths/row heights and other formatting, no problem.

And for large data sets, or data that requires extensive filtering or specialized presentation, FileMaker, no question. It blows all spreadsheets away when it comes to: hundreds of thousands of rows (or millions), and it supports limitless separate views of the same data. Anyone who does serious work in excel that includes large data, normalize-able data, or extensive presentation or filtering, you owe it to yourself to check out FileMaker.

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

#203

Post by azakai » Thu, Dec 12, 2013, 5:32 AM UTC

motti wrote: post #191

wodenokoto wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 di…

If it worked in Chrome outside of the store, it would be more plausible. But requiring the Chrome Store seems to indicate it is not using just standard HTML5 stuff like appCache. The issue of limited storage or not seems insufficient to explain this.

Very disappointing.

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

#204

Post by martinpw » Thu, Dec 12, 2013, 5:36 AM UTC

dkl wrote: post #84

Can you select multiple, discontiguous cells or columns or rows yet?? That's the thing that kills me that is not implemented.

No, it is still not there. First thing I tried. :-(

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

#205

Post by aagha » Thu, Dec 12, 2013, 5:41 AM UTC

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…

Is it possible that maybe you're jus tnot a GMail power user? Given the choice between Gmail and Outlook, I choose former seven days a week, and twice on Sunday.

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

#206

Post by sytelus » Thu, Dec 12, 2013, 5:43 AM UTC

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 wouldn't count on this: > Using a native rich application is always going to be superior to building a web app on top of a browser

I firmly believe there would be no "native applications" within 10 years of time.

Outlook is very easily the the application that I hate from bottom of my heart. You are correct that other alternatives are not that good either and that's why Outlook still lives on. Even in 2013, its search feature is laughing stock. It hangs all the time, takes up lots of memory, rules can't be other than presets, its ranking function is sort by date, it can't do spam, TODO list integration is mess, it blocks good attachments, it can't keep conversation togather, it screws HTML and even its spell check is straight from 18th century. If you look at release over release enhancements, it pretty much has remains same, as if there is no one really working on it. Outlook is a shame to human kind considering so many people has to use it despite of it being a pig.

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

#207

Post by etrain » Thu, Dec 12, 2013, 5:47 AM UTC

Spearchucker wrote: post #171

selectnull wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've switched to gmail some 4 years ago and before that was Outlook user since the 90es; that means I'm not familiar with the latest office version but it's not like I'm speaking without any experience. Gmail has one of the best keyboard shortcuts ever, thing that always anoyed me with Outlook was that focus would get stuck between two panes and the only way out was to click with mouse. With few labels, powerful filt…

I don't search much. What I do a lot of is sort my inbox by sender. Pretty basic feature right there.

To play devil's advocate - isn't the reason you're sorting so that you can find information more easily? Aren't you manually performing search yourself?

While not perfect, I think searching for "from:sender" is more efficient than sort by sender.

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

#208

Post by xerophtye » Thu, Dec 12, 2013, 5:57 AM UTC

sliverstorm wrote: post #100

oftenwrong wrote: post #52

Earlier 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?

One thing that isn't going away in twenty years (or probably ever)- the speed of light. There is a hard limit on how fast latency can get.

what about gigabit net connections? When you run into the limit of a single worker's capability, you employ a second worker! (that's the reasoning behind modern processors btw). And thus, speed of light isn't an issue....

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

#209

Post by aaronbrethorst » Thu, Dec 12, 2013, 6:19 AM UTC

e12e wrote: post #190

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which JSON-based email standard would that be, exactly?

I believe ops point was that any stable api would be preferable to: "Yeah, there's an api, but we refuse to document it, and we'll randomly depricate stuff if you try to use it to build something that isn't gmail". The team behind gmail is probably one of the best qualified to hammer out a working api for email of json (what we have + a bit of what we want + stability and versioning). No reason why they couldn't publ…

Except for competitive reasons and opportunity cost.

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

#210

Post by csmuk » Thu, Dec 12, 2013, 7:10 AM UTC

staticfish wrote: post #180

csmuk wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know if you just really like the platform, or you're on Microsoft's payroll (as this is HN, I'm guessing the second), but you're coming across as the hard-shill.

Odd considering if you look at my other posts you'll find quite the opposite. I sit here writing this on a CentOS ThinkPad...

Being fair and balanced and unbiased is considered a shill now...

Shill is word of the year.