I guess I talk in the name of a new generation when I say that I use Google spreadsheet instead of Microsoft Excel. To tell you the truth, I hardly ever used Excel. I don’t even know if I’m good with it.
What I do know is that I just finished v1 of my social media marketing project management collection of sheets. Thanks to Google’s cloud-based =IMPORTRANGE formula, you can link data across sheets in an infinite number of ways. From the day I knew about this formula, I decided to get started with Google spreadsheets.
Google spreadsheets unbeatable selling points compared to Excel:
- Collaboration: cloud-based collaboration tools are awesome. To add someone to a project, create a new sheet with cells dedicated to incoming data and cells dedicated to outgoing data.
- Import any web content: beyond importing data from just any other Google spreadsheet, you can import data from any web page (=IMPORTDATA), RSS feed (=IMPORTFEED)…
- Share your project with the whole web through a widget, share the public link to your spreadsheet, and even share only one sheet out of the whole doc and protect the other ones.
- Access from anywhere, anytime, use offline.
- Leverage g docs’ folder system to organize your docs in the most flexible ways, and utilize the folder sharing function to share bundles of docs.
- Download your spreadsheet in any of the commonly-known formats.
- Through Google oauth, explore new ways to use your spreadsheets through third-party applications.
- Ahab: Ahab is a Google spreadsheets expert, one that understands how Google spreadsheets work and who gets very creative (from my point of view) when you need a hack around any kind of trouble you may stumble upon in your g sheet adventures. To this day, Ahab contributed more than 13,000 times in the Google spreadsheet help forum. Without the brain of that guy, I would have never used Google spreadsheets.
- Improvements to the Google spreadsheets from the development team are by far more frequent.
- The limits to Google spreadsheets (shown below through the screen captures) are actually a driver for cloud-based data management innovation. The system has a few limits, but so many possibilities to explore!
