The latest Google tool aimed at sharing information within workteams could end the constant exchange of updated Excel spreadsheets. Google Spreadsheets (see link at http://labs.google.com/) allows me to import an existing Excel spreadsheet and then share it with any of my colleagues, even ones that may not have Excel on their PCs.
It’s still at a relatively early stage of development – you cannot (yet) produce graphs from the data, for example – but, as with other elements of Google’s drive to make office software functionality freely available via the browser (eg: its acquisition of Writely, the word processor), it could chip away at many computer users’ conviction that they need to maintain their own copy of all of their applications and data. As an advocate of software delivered via the application service provider (ASP) model, to me this is a significant development.
