My review of Google Spreadsheets

I needed to do a quick data grid in a spreadsheet and I decided to use Google's Spreadsheet Web Application to do the job for me.

First I copied some data from another web application and pasted it into here.  No issues.

I needed to then resize the columns to make the text fit.  That seemed to expand all the columns but that was easily fixed.

Deleted a couple of unneeded columns and added another.  In the new column I needed to multiple the column to the left by 60 and put the results in my new column.  Using the formulas I learned in Excel. =B2 * 60 did the trick.

Copied and pasted that all the way down the column and it calculated the the rows the way I wanted.  So far so good.

Now for cosmetic adjustment.  This is were I think Google Spreadsheets has the most room for improvement.  One of the nice features in Excel and in OpenOffice.org Calc is the Auto Format feature where you highlight your spreadsheet and give it a theme.  I couldn't find anything like that in Google Spreadsheets.  Oh well, it wasn't that many rows and column. I went ahead and made alternating row colors and a header color with the formatting tool.  Not to hard at all just some busy work.

Now usually in this step of making the document I would copy all the cells and paste it right into Word or OpenOffice.org Write...but when I pasted it all I got was the data, no formatting!  I was able to export the spreadsheet out to xls and I opened it in OpenOffice.org Calc.  I had to only adjust the column widths and heights and then I was able to copy and paste into Write.

So Google Spreadsheets is a great online web application but still lacking, for me anyways, the importing of data from a spreadsheet to a word processing application...maybe they will read this and find a way.