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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

#161

Post by kbenson »

kyrra wrote: post #135
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 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…

According to this[1], you can use PCRE in gmail search, but I'm having mixed results.

1: http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/2433/wildcard-sea...

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

#162

Post by [deleted] »

qw wrote: post #140
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There are companies that provide hosting services for Exchange, so there is no need for a local installation.

[deleted]

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

#163

Post by deelowe »

bane wrote: post #88
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…

> 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.

Expand the conversation and use the built-in browser search.

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

#164

Post by dragontamer »

ladzoppelin wrote: post #143
source99 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What features would you add to Gmail to make it more useful for business users? What UI fixes would you make? How do I get started writing plugins for gmail to add the above features and fixes?

For starters Google could of kept compatibility with the activesync protocol instead of making calender sync with outlook the horrific monster it is today. Actions like this are just one of the multiple reasons I tell people to not invest invest Google business products.

Amen. Gmail has _lost_ features over the years, as opposed to gain any.

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

#165

Post by csmuk »

VikingCoder wrote: post #136
csmuk wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you actually used office? It has change tracking, diff and merge and has done for over 10 years. The problem here is network locking which is totally different.

You can TURN ON change tracking (more on that in a moment) in Office applications. It doesn't exist on the web interface of Skydrive at all. The change tracking in office is nothing at all like the "See Revision History" in Google Docs. The Google Docs one is miles better.

Yes if you want it you can. Then again you can also enforce change tracking by policy.

Regarding SkyDrive, you're talking rubbish. It's been there for literally years.

Right click a document in skydrive and select "Version history". You can review every version, restore earlier versions and open the changes up in Word if you have it installed and review there.

If you go "big" and use O365 you can review and accept, annotate all changes and commit to sharepoint for example from your desktop app.

You can even wire it into review workflows so that commits are staged and reviewed by an editor, people are notified etc. This is great for legal documents, contracts etc.

Google Docs doesn't get a look in.

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

#166

Post by csmuk »

VikingCoder wrote: post #160
csmuk wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to expand on this rather than draw a baseless analogy?

Have you used Google Docs collaboratively with another person? While I type, I see what you're typing. If you instead use Excel files stored on the network, and you and I want to "collaborate" on a document, at best we're ping-ponging the file back and forth to each other. Sometimes we collide, and have to Merge - which is very painful if we've made any kind of extensive changes. Suggesting Sharepoint / SVN is a reas…

Yeah I have actually. It's horrible and really unreliable when document sizes get realistic (40+ pages). Not only that it's so easy to fuck up the document structure badly.

I wouldn't use Excel files on a network. I'd use a database or chuck the xlsx into SVN. Changes to complex data need to be managed. Don't expect miracles. There are edge cases where Google Docs will get this wrong. Sync needs human decisions made occasionally.

See my other comments about usage of SVN/Sharepoint and the use cases.

Office 365 is sharepoint. Skydrive is actually a variety of sharepoint. The interface isn't great but neither is google docs, which is why larger companies tend to just use Sharepoint Workspace which is a desktop app for accessing sharepoint portals.

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

#167

Post by VikingCoder »

csmuk wrote: post #165
VikingCoder wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can TURN ON change tracking (more on that in a moment) in Office applications. It doesn't exist on the web interface of Skydrive at all. The change tracking in office is nothing at all like the "See Revision History" in Google Docs. The Google Docs one is miles better.

Yes if you want it you can. Then again you can also enforce change tracking by policy. Regarding SkyDrive, you're talking rubbish. It's been there for literally years. Right click a document in skydrive and select "Version history". You can review every version, restore earlier versions and open the changes up in Word if you have it installed and review there. If you go "big" and use O365 you can review and accept, a…

Ah, foolish me, I thought I could find a revision history from within a document.

It takes about 5 seconds to change which revision I'm looking at, in a 30-line document. And it doesn't actually show me which lines changed.

This is still useless.

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

#168

Post by Navarr »

gdulli wrote: post #93
freyr wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

He said including Google, not including Gmail.

Gmail should not be indicative of whether or not web apps can match desktop apps. It should be indicative of whether or not the engineers behind Gmail have focused on making it work as well as a desktop app (they have not).

They've spent a lot more time making Gmail Offline work well. Maybe sometime in the future they'll spend time optimizing; but it's probably not a priority

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

#169

Post by csmuk »

VikingCoder wrote: post #167
csmuk wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes if you want it you can. Then again you can also enforce change tracking by policy. Regarding SkyDrive, you're talking rubbish. It's been there for literally years. Right click a document in skydrive and select "Version history". You can review every version, restore earlier versions and open the changes up in Word if you have it installed and review there. If you go "big" and use O365 you can review and accept, a…

Ah, foolish me, I thought I could find a revision history from within a document. It takes about 5 seconds to change which revision I'm looking at, in a 30-line document. And it doesn't actually show me which lines changed. This is still useless.

Fair enough - they should probably add this.

I'm not getting a 5 second delay here. It's instant (~0.5 seconds).

You're right about the changes not being marked up, although it does do this on Office 365 so perhaps it's a market segregation thing.

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

#170

Post by VikingCoder »

csmuk wrote: post #166
VikingCoder wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you used Google Docs collaboratively with another person? While I type, I see what you're typing. If you instead use Excel files stored on the network, and you and I want to "collaborate" on a document, at best we're ping-ponging the file back and forth to each other. Sometimes we collide, and have to Merge - which is very painful if we've made any kind of extensive changes. Suggesting Sharepoint / SVN is a reas…

Yeah I have actually. It's horrible and really unreliable when document sizes get realistic (40+ pages). Not only that it's so easy to fuck up the document structure badly. I wouldn't use Excel files on a network. I'd use a database or chuck the xlsx into SVN. Changes to complex data need to be managed. Don't expect miracles. There are edge cases where Google Docs will get this wrong. Sync needs human decisions made…

I've never seen any of the unreliability you're talking about, and I've very rarely had a document structure get messed up.

It's like you're reviewing a completely different product from the one I've used daily, for years.

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