http://www.google.com/googlespreadsheets/tour1.html
This amuses me no end. I've been playing around with it for a while. It's on the slow side.
Google Spreadsheets
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quantus
- Tenth Dan Procrastinator
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- Joined: Fri Jul 18, 2003 3:09 am
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These are ok for pure calculation, but you can't do graphs or pivots or even sort while maintaining a header row. If these features could be included, they'd have something that would really start to compete with net meeting and similar conferencing software. Multiple users editting the same spreadsheet, while very compelling for collaboration, is just simply not good enough without the other features. It is however an excellent demonstration of web technologies and yet another example of why non-graphics intensive applications are going to move to being hosted with web gui's.
I agree that the speed is a bit on the poor side, but with just AJAX, I don't think they're gonna do much better. Maybe Google can use Flash like they did for their finance page to do graphs and such and just speed up the interface in general. Speaking of the finance page, I think the interface is nearly good enough to beat Yahoo's. Yahoo seems to be moving to a more interactive homepage finally, but the interface is a bit slow and clunky still. If they switch their finance page over without cleaning things up, they're definately gonna start losing out to Google. Yahoo needs to keep in mind that AJAX is about responsiveness, not making things move around on the screen just because you can.
I agree that the speed is a bit on the poor side, but with just AJAX, I don't think they're gonna do much better. Maybe Google can use Flash like they did for their finance page to do graphs and such and just speed up the interface in general. Speaking of the finance page, I think the interface is nearly good enough to beat Yahoo's. Yahoo seems to be moving to a more interactive homepage finally, but the interface is a bit slow and clunky still. If they switch their finance page over without cleaning things up, they're definately gonna start losing out to Google. Yahoo needs to keep in mind that AJAX is about responsiveness, not making things move around on the screen just because you can.