An invite for Google Spreadsheets arrived last week (tip: request and invite using a Gmail account) and I decided to use to track our VTOR group blog posts and ad income. This way I’ll be able to share it with the rest of our group.

One of the first things that puzzled me was how to gracefully end/close a formula? Turns out it’s easy: just press the TAB key. As you can see from the names and posts above, it looks like a standard spreadsheet. If you want to see the whole spreadsheet click the image to expand the image below. The columns make up the monthly blog post results. The bottom section calculates the $Linden dollar to $USD conversion. All group members are paid in L$inden dollars for their blogging efforts.

Thoughts while using
- I like how it auto saves changes, one less step
- can you put clickable URLs in the spreadsheet? Yes? How? No? Bummer. Looks like Dan Bricklin’s VisiCalc app (beta) does [Update 10:02am PST: USA Today has a good article about Bricklin being the creator of the first spreadsheet]. My friend Lestat sent me an invite for Thinkfree which he likes to use for sharing documents, not sure if that allows hyperlinks in cells.
- sharing the spreadsheet is as easy as sending a friend an email. You can choose to share with view only permissions or view/edit
- You can chat with invited/shared folks about the spreadsheet while editing

- currently invites can only go to those with Google accounts, an error message will appear if you try to send an email invite to someone that doesn’t have a Google account to view/edit a spreadsheet
- chat (tested in Firefox) became extremely buggy with the text scrolling up into nowhere and heard to read. When I clicked “hide chat” and then clicked on chat with 1 person again, the chat never came back
- limit of 100 spreadsheets during the beta and each spreadsheet has a size limitation

Overall opinion
It’s definitely rough in its current limited beta state, which is to be expected based on similar launches (guess I’m getting more forgiving for anything labeled “limited”), but I can see how sharing some basic spreadsheets this could be somewhat worthwhile. Want to keep using for our group and see where it goes, but I am definitely disappointed in the current state of the chat in Firefox. Will use other chat most likely.

Any other online sharing apps that you like with similar/more features? I understand there are several others out there. Please don’t just leave a link to something else, also tell us why you like something that competes.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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