Google to Unveil Spreadsheet Program

I personally wouldn't use such a program. I would rather use OpenOffice.org's Calc free spreadsheet program.

Macs have a definite lack of non-Microsoft based spreadsheet offerings. This would be quite welcome!

All of those free programs pose a possible threat to Microsoft...

Um, really?

I would emphasize the use of the word "possible" in that statement, as in "possible, but not probable". Considering those online "office" programs are quite crippled when compared to Microsoft's offerings, I think, well, anything is possible, but in this case, not very probable.

If anything, more robust programs (like the above-mentioned OpenOffice) bundled with alternatives for the rest of the M$ Office programs (like outlook) would have a better chance at causing any sort of threat here, and that's if they caught on and got a much larger following than they currently have. I think companies all around the globe, and the people working in those companies, are in a "zombie" mode when it comes to using spreadsheet / word processing / email / calendar software at work. Most of them only know of Microsoft Office, and are happy to keep working with it.

I hope they fix the calendar bug first.

got a url for it?

I'm quite excited about this as well as Google's acquisition of Writely.

They have Mail, Calendar, address book (part of mail and calendar). They are pretty much almost there.

They seem to be doing the ajaxlaunch thing, and covering all the possible in-browser desktop tools thing for your on-the-move businessman or public-wifi-hotspot-user... If only my Windows Mobile handheld supported AJAX 'software' implementations properly, I'd probably use em more!

hmm.. Google is starting to resemble a kid in a candy store who, unable to decide which candy to sample, tries to eat all of it and falls sick..

Am I the only person starting to get sick of the hype surrounding this company.. they showed great promise, delivered a few exciting products (basic search, desktop, earth) and then launched a number of pointless applications (google talk, google video, and others..) that seem to perpetually be in beta... I think they need to refocus on the basics and get search right before they start trying to conquer the world..

a few examples of search features we could really use:
- time based search (so your search results show when documents were published).. i realize this might require web sites to voluntarily add some metadata that google can index, but google should be able to define a set of custom meta-tags that can be used to provide intelligent results.. perhaps over time these tags can become part of the html spec..
- category based search results (define a taxonomy of some kind and associate results with search)... in a perfect world, search results would show up as tied to semantic concepts that can be navigated to refine or broaden search results.. i.e, a search results graph..

I can think of a few more, but dont really feel like doing their product manager's job for them :)

I am not completely sold on the "Internet Office" yet. I like to work when I DON'T have an Internet connection therefore I will need a physical copy on my machine. Why would I want to keep two sets of documents and use two different programs. Nice concept in theory but not in practice.

It works pretty well. It has some really nice features, and some other cool things too. I went into it on my Column.