Google Spreadsheets — getting better

I had the opportunity to use Google spreadsheets for some data gathering this week and thought I would write about my experiences. We are using Google Apps and Gmail at my company, Gnip, to facilitate document sharing. However, I am one of those people that mostly uses my desktop Office apps to create documents and then I just upload them to Google Docs.

For a bit of research we are doing we decided to use the new Form editor in Google Spreadsheets. (For people that want to keep up with the Google Apps team I would recommend following their blog) I’m very excited to see a lot of recent updates to the spreadsheets and the reporting and form editors. For our project the results were mixed. The main reason we used the Google Spreadsheets was to try out the “data analysis” feature which auto-generates a report based on using a form for data entry. The results were great for the questions we entered before we started entering data. However, as happens a lot of times we can up with a few new questions after we had entered some data. What we did was add the questions and hand entered the data to the spreadsheet for the existing entries. The result: the hand entered data in the spreadsheet was not included in the auto-generated graphs (bummer) so we are left with a complete data set, but auto-generated graphs that do not match the full data set. This appears to be a known issue to the Google Spreadsheet team so we look forward to new capability being added. As for my data, I just had to generate my own complete graphs.

Google Chrome – will it really be complimentary?

The big tech news is Google announcing their long awaited browser that has been speculated on for at least a couple years. Chrome is the project name and the early news is very interesting.

It appears that in several areas the good news is that Google is not creating a whole new browser from scratch.  For example, I found the fact that they are using the same rendering engine already used by several existing browsers very refreshing. (Webkit).   Too often development teams feel the need to create something new and rendering engines and app frameworks are often areas people build things that really do not need to be built.  From the Official Google Blog entry on Chrome:

We owe a great debt to many open source projects, and we’re committed to continuing on their path. We’ve used components from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox, among others — and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well. We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward.

TechCrunch also has a nice write up on the Google Chrome press conference.

I am also very interested to see how well the support for multiple running processes works and if as has been speculated, Chrome, really will end up being complimentary to existing browsers like Firefox and IE7.   There is speculation that either Mozilla or Microsoft could incorporate aspects of Chrome into their existing browsers.   This might be possible for Mozilla, but that sure does not seem to be likely for Microsoft given the likely competitive concerns that would be raised.

I plan to download Chrome and play with it so will share my thoughts in the coming weeks.