Google Spreadsheets

I’m a big fan of Google. (Now may be the time to mention that I’m a technology geek.) They do things right. Of course there’s the search engine, Google Maps, and Gmail that everybody knows and loves. Then there’s useful desktop applications like Google Earth, Picasa, and Sketchup, all of which I use. Well they’ve done it yet again with Google Spreadsheets. Think of it as being able to have a free spreadsheet application, online so you can collaborate with others. If you already have Excel and never collaborate with others you may not care but this is awesome when you need several people to work on the same spreadsheet. By the way, it imports and exports .xls files. This is just another component in Google’s plans to provide a complete suite of free, thin-client (online through a web browser) office applications. Gmail is the email part along with Google Calendar (Outlook), this is the spreadsheet application (Excel), they’ve already bought Writely to become the word processor (Word), which only leaves some sort of visual presentation software (PowerPoint) to fully compete with Microsoft Office.