Category Archives: AJAX

Google Spreadsheets falls short

06 Tuesday Jun 2006

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Now, Homestead has as a fairly complex AJAX application for page editing called SiteBuilder Lite. I know it well and I know that while AJAX is really easy, really good AJAX is difficult.  And at that level, I appreciate what Google has done with Google Spreadsheets.  It’s a good feat of engineering.

I’m also a very experienced Excel user. I’m no great fan of MS, but I recognize that Excel is one awesome piece of software. In my humble opinion, it’s the best thing they have and is really indispensible in pretty much everything that I do, and everything that businesses (small and large) do.  So after watching the videos on Google Blogoscoped (I have to admit I haven’t played with Google Spreadsheets myself, as I didn’t get an invitation), it’s really obvious that MS has nothing to worry about.

Why?

  • Philipp Lenssen has a miserable time dealing with sorting data (can’t deal with header rows) and inserting data. (Starting at 1:28 in the first video)
  • While the formula list is extensive, the interface for dealing with them is really weak (especially it’s issues with reselecting cells for use in a formula). (5:22 in the first video)
  • No graphing capabilities.
  • Because I’ve only seen the video, I don’t know what the keyboard shortcuts are, but in Excel, keyboard interface is very important.
  • From the video, I can’t tell if formulas are translated relatively when copied.  I assume so, because if not, it is completely unusable.
  • Automatic column resizing (double click on a column border to resize the column to its minimal width).

And those are, to me, the most blatant things missing that almost all Excel users will miss. I won’t even go into the stuff that I use everyday that are missing (pivot tables, filters, cross-tab & cross-document references, borders, mapping cells to DB queries, etc).

To be fair, the collaboration is cool and could be useful in some situations, but I think it’s inadequate for most business applications.

TechCrunch lists a bunch of other AJAX spreadsheets and I still have to check them out. It’s been a while since I’ve played with them. Michael Arrington missed Tracker from Jotspot, so check that out, too.

Of course, this is just the first release and Google could make it better. But will they do that?  Or will this be one of those projects that sits on the Google Labs forever? I don’t know if Google cares enough about this to really take on Excel, but we’ll just have to see.

ajaxWrite: what about IE?

23 Thursday Mar 2006

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There’s buzz over at Memorandum about the launch of ajaxWrite. Some good (and good and good) and some not so good.

Technically, there’s not much there. We here at Homestead have a fully AJAX web page builder (before Google and MS), so we’re very familiar with how the designMode setting works and the power that it provides. The most interesting thing technically here is that it can open Word docs. Not rocket science, but it’s some work.

Some limitations that I noticed right away because Michael Robertson didn’t solve them (but we did):

  • There are only 7 font sizes. As I hope we all remember, HTML really only has 7 font sizes (CSS has more of course), and the designMode functions only allow you to set those 7 font sizes (1 through 7). We allow a ton more.
  • A bulleted list has a one-line gap from the line above it that can’t be removed.  Again, this is a limitation of HTML (without CSS), and so is a limitation that he just accepted from default designMode behavior.

Really, there isn’t much here. It’s still interesting; it just needs a lot of work. I hate the bloat of MSWord (I hate it when people send me Word docs when a rich text email would have been just fine), but this in no way competes with Word. I don’t think Bill is sweating just yet.

But what really gets me is this. I’ve complained about it before, and I’ll do it again. What about IE? In our experience, IE’s designMode functionality is better than Firefox’s (Homestead’s SiteBuilder app works in both IE and Firefox). If you are even remotely serious about taking on Word, why would you exclude IE? I’d love to hear any reason other than simple, short-sighted anti-MS politics. Again, Bill isn’t sweating just yet.