I recently read Ed Kohler’s comment where he has ranked the importance of various "Google Apps" programs in the following order:
1. Docs
2. Presentation
3. Spreadsheet
However, I beg to differ.
In my personal experience I have found spreadsheet to be most used online collaborative tool of the entire office suite.
An online spreadsheet can be used in hundreds of ways for different purpose and help you collaborate much better for several reasons:
1. Spreadsheets keep data in a more organized way which can be further imported / exported as a comma delimited file and also imported / exported from a third party database
2. Some common usage can be sales tracking, basic level project tracking, bug management, issue tracking, any collaborative data gathering, managing petty accounts, etc. The list is endless. You cannot do all this using word processor or presentation tools online.
3. Every spreadsheet has several sheets, which enables various versions of inputs to be gathered from different sources, all put together in one place with a very easy-to-shuffle mechanism.
May be my opinion is based on the way I use Google Apps!
What is your opinion?
Abhishek
Abhishek, thanks for the commentary on my article. You make a compelling argument for spreadsheets. I haven’t been caught up in much spreadsheet work in recent years, so I may be underselling the value of collaborative spreadsheet management.
Hi Ed,
Nice to hear from you. I think its all about personal experiences. Different people uses the same software in different ways and it is fun to see how they use it.
BTW, the real point is that “usage” is behind “technology and innovation” at this point. We have so many tools and technologies, but how often we use them to their maximum?
Abhishek
My opinion is that the importance of each of google’s application tools, is probably more or less based on the individual using it, and the need they have for a particular product. I personally have only used the google docs, and can’t really say much about the other products, but I’m sure one’s necessity for a given product has a lot to do with which product they perfer.
Nice Blog…
Hi BeautyofWisdom,
Well said.
It is more important how we use the available technology.
The best application tools are those, which can be widely used in a variety of situations with little bit of innovation and improvisation. The challenge for application tool developers is to build something simple, yet customizable! – A paradox in true sense.
Abhishek