Web 2.0 Google Docs and Spreadsheets

Attached is the transcript of my recent gabcast on Google Docs and Spreadsheets.

http://www.gabcast.com/index.php?a=episodes&query=&b=play&id=13007&cast=39913&castPage=&autoplay=true


Enjoy,
Mark


Hello My name is Mark Gerschefske and I’m a doctoral student at Colorado Technical University. I’m presently studying Socio Technical Futuring and reviewing the innovations that have been made with Web 2.0.

I would like to welcome everyone to my gabcast on Google’s Docs and spreadsheet. This discussion will provide a brief over view of the collaborative environment for documents and spreadsheets as provided by Google

This gabcast will be structured into three parts…Part one will discuss Google Docs … Part two will talk to Google Spread sheets… the part three being a general summation of both Google tools.

GOOGLE DOCS

To start with I’ll discuss the ability of Docs …I imported some sample text then started to tested the features in the tool bar. All the features such as fonts, colored text worked well . Different style are supported along with comments. One nice feature was a revision tab which shows what changes have been and by who. The only negative comment that I would make was the editing features are limited to more common ones. Such advanced features such as search and replace are not supported. However it does support saving the text in Word, Open Office and standard formats such as PDF, RFT, HTML etc.

It allows you insert objects such as images, Links, comments, tables, bookmarks, and special characters. When you select special characters it brings up a table showing special characters, Asian character, wingdings, and advanced. The advanced tab allows for you to specify the Unicode and also preview it before inserting into the document. Very nice feature…

It also includes a HTML editor which makes it a nice round package for the right price…free

GOOGLE SHPREADSHEET

To change form Google docs to Google spreadsheets you must click on DOC Homes in the upper right hand corner of the screen. This takes you to your Google DOC home page that shows all your folders. From there you click on NEW in the tool bar and select spreadsheet from the drop down menu,

I started by copying a spread sheet and pasting it into Google. The first thing that I noticed was all the highlighting disappeared along with the charts. Next I changed some of the numerical fields to see if the formulas still worked. Nothing!! A little disappointing that the first two tasks failed….So I selected the Formulas Tab to see if the where copied over…nothing there. So that explained why it could recalculate the spreadsheet. Next test was to see if I could chart the data that was copied over. That seem to work fairly well except for it didn’t support logarithmic scaling, so if there is a wide delta between the data points it will appear off the scale. This could be considered an advance function so I can understand why it wasn’t supported.

Other features such as add another sheet or duplicate a work sheet preformed well. I decided to compose a simple spread sheet to see how easy it was to use. I enter the year 2000 and clicked on the lower right corner while press CRTL and dragged across the screen expecting to inclement by one. Instead I got 2003, 2002, 2004, 2001, and 2005. What I expected to see 2000 incremented by on ending in 2005. Maybe a new feature HMMM. When I tried the same task starting from 1 and incrementing by ten… I got 1,7,6,8,9,10,11,12,13,and 14. Once it got to 8 it worked as expected other than skipping 2-5. Well done Google


To summarize…Google Docs and Spreadsheets are not bad as entry level collaborator tools. Both of them suffered from a lack of features that we have grown to expect when compared to Microsoft Office. I understand this may be an unfair comparison, but it is the bench mark everyone is compared to. When considered that these are free tools that are Web based, they are not bad for a first start. I did appear to find a bug in Google’s spreadsheet in the way that it increments numbers. I would have expected them to have caught such a simple error in their testing prior to it being released. I guess that Microsoft is not the only company that has problems with quality control. Another distraction was the time lag due to it being Web based. I have a 1 ½ meg down Internet connection, but sometimes it took several seconds for the changes to appear on the screen. As more features are added I see Google Docs and Spreadsheets becoming popular with students and home users who don’t want to invest in expensive software.

This is Mark Gerschefske signing off and hopping that you found my gabcast on Google Docs and Spreadsheets informative. Thank You.