Limitations of Google Spreadsheets - Technology Evangelist

I've become a big fan of Google Spreadsheets over the past few months for a number of reasons. The primary being the ability to collaboratively work on a single spreadsheet simultaneously from more than one location. That's a powerful feature that's particularly valuable in data gathering situations.

But it has a few limitations that are worth noting as of this writing. Over time, I see no reason why they won't get worked out, but they could be deal killers for you today depending on how you use spreadsheets.

1. No multi-column sort. Say you want to sort ascending by column C, then ascending by column D so D breaks the ties of column C. You can't do that today. Only one-column sorting is supported.

2. Clipboard limitations. You can only copy 1000 cell's worth of data at a time. So a 250 row x 9 column spreadsheet would take a minimum of 3 copy/pastes to move somewhere else (offline or to a different online spreadsheet). It copies the first 1000 cell's worth of rows, so it's easy to tell where it left off, but it's still painful if you deal with spreadsheets of any weight.

3. Safari formatting. Spreadsheets works in Safari, but I've had some issues with cell focusing. For example, clicking into a cell will often focus my cursor in the cell above the one I wanted. It's not the end of the world, but not as polished as I'd expect.

4. Limited menus. Spreadsheets supports a lot more commands than the limited menus would lead you to believe. If you have experience with other spreadsheets like Excel, try using the commands shortcuts from there to see if they're supported. Fill-down is an example that comes to mind. Spreadsheets does it, but there is no menu option for it today.

What would you add to this list?

I find the whole sorting to be very confusing. In Excel, it's just super easy to sort whatever you want.

Although it doesn't have multi-column sort, I think you can workaround it by first sorting by your secondary sort criteria then sorting by the primary column.

Although Google has virtually unlimited development funds, I would blame the browser and not Google spreadsheets for your Safari issue.

Safari is almost as finicky and quirky as IE. Why not just use Firefox on the Apple and be done with it?

Good point, Rob. I do primarily use FF, but find myself using 2 browsers from time to time in order to log in to more than one Google account. I've found that it's also faster for me to toggle between browsers than tabs for some tasks.

Comments

1. Posted by: Ang on July 10, 2008 6:10 PM:

1.Spreadsheets only allows you to highlight multiple consecutive cells. You can't highlight A1 and B9, for example. Nor can you highlight multiple columns or rows if they are not consecutive.

2. As far as I can tell, you cannot Auto Filter columns. Sometimes I need to group my information without altering the order it's in.

3. Dragging the contents of one cell into another is sort of clumsy. It's a smooth transition in Excel.

4. One thing Spreadsheets is definitely missing is Paste Special.

I know there are more because every time I use Spreadsheets I discover something it's missing. Great topic.

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