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Linknet-Columns.com features articles and weekly syndicated columns in specific areas of interest such as Marketing, Travel, Health, Business Opportunities, Product Features, Golf. Advertise with Linknet. Get links and create a powerful online presence. Google Spreadsheets Begins Beta TestingJun 8, 2006 - Linknet Internet News Antivirus: Download Norton AntiVirus 2006 - Immediate download Language jobs - Get a job using your language skills at languagejobs4u.com. Link Popularity - Linkpopularity durch professionellen Linkaufbau Make Money with PPC Ads - Premierad.com pays up to 75% of advertising revenue. Google Spreadsheets Begins Beta Testing by Rick HendershotGoogle has just unveiled a "Sneak Peek" of a new little utility called Google Spreadsheets. This is part of the company's attempt to create a suite of free or almost free online office tools that will make a dent in the Microsoft dominance in this area. Spreadsheets is still in development, but Google has made the online program available for a limited number of testers. You sign up and they will let you know if you have been chosen as a tester -- assigned on a first come first served basis. According to the online presentation, Google Spreadsheets will let you create basic spreadsheets from scratch, "including changing the number format, sorting by columns, and adding formulas." It will also let you upload already existing .csv and .xls worksheets and retain their formatting when imported. You can give other people access to your online spreadsheets too. Permission is done via email address. You just enter the email addresses of others who you want to share your spreadsheets, and they are sent an invitation. As soon as they sign in they have access, and can view or modify the spreadsheet at the same time as anyone else who is signed in. When more than one team members is signed in a chat window opens up so they can communicate with each other as changes are made. Storage is online (on a Google server), so you have access to your spreadsheets whenever you have access to the web. You can also save them locally in .csv, .xls or .html format. In a recent issue of WebProNews, staff writer David Utter says, "Google Spreadsheets looks interesting, and we're looking forward to playing with it when Google starts inviting people into the controlled beta. But without advanced features like macros or pivot tables, Google's newest Lab experiment just isn't close to Microsoft Excel." I suspect, however, that many Excel users do not use a lot of the advanced features of the program, and, like me, often use it just as a means of creating a table of information. Another problem with Excel is that spreadsheets are not easily put on line and shared with others -- say, when working on a joint project. Google Spreadsheets addresses this problem head-on. The fact is, you often don't need "macros and pivot tables" for these purposes. I can think of two or three current projects I am working on where being able to share information in table form, and where other team members could add to or modify table contents would be quite useful. There have been a few times in the past when I wished putting an Excel spreadsheet online wasn't such a clunky exercise. Google Spreadsheets may not be a big money maker for Google, but it may turn out to be surprisingly useful, and will be another reminder that for many relatively mundane tasks it is not necessary to buy expensive software from Microsoft.
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