So Bob Hull, who doesn’t give a rat’s ass about Web 2.0, sends out this email today to a couple of other spreadsheet nerds in my practice:

Hey,

Been trying out the web-based shared spreadsheet beta at google. I’m not sure how fully compatible it is with .XLS formats, but it is a great tool for collaborating remotely (e.g., when Nadine and I were working on the [client] business cases, which weren’t full of advanced functions, it would have helped a lot).

If you haven’t tried – do

I’m sure there are some security issues – although it is PW protected.

The specific case he refers to is illustrative in a couple of ways. We were working on a Linux migration strategy a big Novell customer, including doing financial analysis of several scenarios (e.g., Oracle/Solaris -> Oracle RAC/Linux, Windows -> virtualized Windows on VMWare or XEN). So that’s cool and everything. But we were also working in different locations (Bob’s wife was hospitalized during the project, so he had to leave to care for her, but he foolishly kept working remotely) and with terrible collaboration tools. It was really a case of the slow boat in the convoy determining the speed for everyone.

On that project, as Bob indicates, we really could have used Google’s spreadsheet, or one of the alternatives that are out there.

And, by the way, I’ve been testing it and it seems to import .xls files – as long as they’re fairly simple – with no problem at all. So you can’t bring in a multi-tabbed pivot table rich charting dashboard, but the single tab discounted cash flow analysis comes across fine. And you could reasonably argue that doing DCF is what a spreadsheet ought to be doing, not running your company.

So what?

The product itself is interesting, in that it’s a viable alternative right off the bat to Excel and OpenOffice. But, as I’ve said before about Writely (which Google has subsequently acquired, so they have a word processor and a spreadsheet and check out S5 for presentations), these web based office tools have built-in advantages. Bob highlighted the collaboration aspect, but there are others. For me, foremost among them is format. I don’t know how long .doc is going to be around, but I can bet you that .html is more viable.

Google’s spreadsheet is the first good way I’ve seen to go from .xls to .html, which is not trivial. A lot of spreadsheets, including at Novell, get mailed around principally as presentation layers; columns and rows of numbers. You can do this in HTML, of course, but that’s not in the toolkit for most Excel users. There’s an Export to HTML option in Excel (which is generally very good about importing and exporting), but it generates ‘orribly non-standard HTML. So if I want to generate a web page from my Excel spreadsheet so that I can share it with my team mates, currently the best option that I know of is Google Spreadsheets. Or maybe MS Sharepoint.

Also, if Google plays their hand correctly, it will get better quickly on the basis of the community around it. Do you need a function to convert pre-July 11, 1998 Thai bhat to dollars? Maybe someone had that itch once and scratched it and released it into the wild so not only are there the Excel functions from Microsoft (=sum(b1:b15)) but also (=oldbhat(value, target_currency)).