So the first week of our web life reality experiment is over and the withdrawal symptoms are definitely not gone yet. You very quickly realize the fundamental differences between reviewing an application and using it, or perhaps more precisely actually depending on it. Never the less, and despite the shivers and shakes, so far web life has proven doable.

Gil and I are going through a rigorous selection and first time usage process with word processing, calendar management, spreadsheet manipulating, presentation sharing, you name it. The outcome so far ranges from real “Eurekas” to violent laptop shutdowns. Is the web ready to serve as a real desktop alternative? Well, after the first week we cannot predict yet. Some interim conclusions are making headway though.

Let’s start with spreadsheets. We’re all experiencing a lot of buzz lately, propelled mostly by Google and their recent launch of Google Spreadsheets. While the public discussion is not free of Googlebation, other solutions such as Zoho and iRows receive rave reviews and are considered by many to be much better. ThinkFree offers an online collaborative office suite, spreadsheets included…so many options, so little time, how can one choose???

Apparently the good old pony still has a trick or two left. After registering to all services I made an attempt to upload a heavy duty excel sheet to all. By heavy duty I mean one of those interactive business model spread sheets, where formulas, graphs and formats are embedded so deeply into one another, like a profound case of reheated spaghetti. Inseparable, indivisible. After all, with all due respect to simplicity and the rest of the web 2.0 rah rah, performance is still a key requirement when it comes to real life dependency. iRows got the boot right there. From separation of the different tabs to totally different sheets, through loss of formulas and errors in formatting – the spread sheet I got was not the spread sheet I uploaded. ThinkFree, Zoho and Google took the (really challenging) spread sheet like professionals and made it to the next round.

ThinkFree was eliminated next. ThinkFree is a Java based application, and while having tons of advantages it is not really what we came here to test – a pure web based service. We were left with Google and Zoho and here selection was not that trivial. Zoho sheet is a great application and a part of a bigger online office vision that so far puts together an impressive show. Zoho offers a much more comprehensive office experience then Google does - richer formatting, more user defined options, etc. However, when it came to editing a heavy spreadsheet Zoho was simply too slow. Google offers a much lighter and faster interface. And yeah, it is Google, integrated with my Gmail and with my search. Passing on it would be like passing on Robert De Niro for Taxi Driver.

So here it is. Google Spreadsheets rocks! A reliable, easy to use and comprehend application. It did take some time to switch from Excel to Google, but it felt like driving in a different country for the first time (and not England or Japan), no more. The sharing feature worked like a charm and Gil and I actually edited a few not so trivial sheets in real time for a real work need. The sharing is very intuitive and a chat box powers a real time conversation while editing. Nice! From a simplicity point of view, Google managed to collect the very basic useful features and lay them out on top of the web interface. Everything you need is at the top. If you can’t find it for the first time, try again, chances are it’s there.

The one caveat I could really notice was with the formatting. It seems like Google has not put the finishing touches there. No matter how hard I tried, I could not play with borders, colors, merging of cells and using different panes. Either Google doesn’t support it or I simply can’t tell where it is. Same difference. This is where the Beta concept sucks big time. You can’t finish off a spreadsheet this way. If this is not fixed and quickly, then regretfully I will need to retrack to good old Excel. I do trust Google to finish the job though. Sharing is enough of a use case to launch a service but the real need for online sharing is not really mission critical enough to trigger a desktop-to-web switch. For a first release, though, Google Spreadsheets has more then enough to make the qualifying cut. Their application is definitely usable. Let’s see how I speak in a few months time though, stay tuned!

Next week – Word Processing.