Google Unveils Google Spreadsheets

After acquiring Writely in March, the online word processing application, Google has expanded its office apps offerings by introducing a web based spreadsheet program on Tuesday. At the time of this writing Google Spreadsheets is available on a limited basis by invitation only.

While Google’s spreadsheet isn’t as sophisticated as Excel, its main goal is to put focus on easy sharing and multi-user editing.

Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped manages to get his hands on this new tool. He writes:

Google Spreadsheet usability is quite good. As ever so often, this is a Google product with no ads so far (ads might be on the horizon, of course); it’s more a tool than a site, clearly fitting into the growing array of Google OS products. The only thing I really missed so far was right-clicking rows to apply formatting changes or to copy & paste text. (It’s not trivial working around the default browser context menu, which in certain contexts can’t be replaced at all by a web page.) That, and the ability to create graphs from your data (and the help file also needs to be completed yet). But that’s the good thing about web apps; they can be constantly updated by the developers in the background without any of us ever having to install a new version.

Read more: Inside Google Spreadsheets