Simon Dickson, principal consultant at Puffbox, writes stuff about e-government, online news and politics. Some important people read it.

Google Docs not there yet

7 February 2008 , , , , ,

I haven't played with Google Docs for a while, but news of a form designer to ease spreadsheet input intrigued me. A lot of spreadsheets, especially in an office environment, are actually pseudo-databases. So why not treat spreadsheet data entry like a database?

It's a great idea, but the initial execution is a bit disappointing. The form designer is pretty limited: some nice Ajax-y touches, but a restricted number of field types, and no easy way to enter dates (pre-population? popup calendar?). I have a couple of work-related spreadsheets which I update on a rolling basis, and which I'd happily move over to this kind of form-based approach... but sorry, not yet. Wufoo still seems to be the leader in online forms... and with the addition of payment processing, it opens up all sorts of possibilities.

But the whole Google Docs experience is definitely improving. I tried using the Prism browser, which is basically Firefox stripped bare: and it made for a more natural 'Office-y' experience. It was actually surprising how much the lack of familiar browser screen furniture helped. But I think it really needs to be offline-enabled (via Google Gears or Firefox v3?) to make its breakthrough. That may not be far away, as it happens: offline Google Docs access has been spotted in testing.

  • I've been using these a lot lately, they're definitely improving all the time. Been hearing about the offline synching for a while from a friend, they are impressed. Biggest annoyance for me is the lack of export function for the slideshow, that is way behind docs and sheets in its development.

Stop wasting your time RSS feed

Let us tell you when there's new stuff to read at puffbox.com, by subscribing to the RSS feed.

Go on, show your face

If you want your photo to appear beside any comments you leave here, hop over to Gravatar and upload a picture of yourself. Otherwise, we'll just assume the machine-generated monster is a fair likeness.

Tag cloud

Puffbox.com archives

Search

Alan's comments feed

By popular demand: the comments feed

Ancient history

For posts during 2006 or 2007, Simon's old blog's archives are still available.