El Ruso

Google Spreadsheets: Not really a threat to Excel

June 6th, 2006

Vinny Carpenter takes a quick look at the just-launched Google Spreadsheets. Although some people think this is an Excel challenger. I, however, don’t think it’s a threat to Excel power base at all.

Although it’s well known that most of the time Excel is used for fairly basic tasks, most of the biggest users (consulting, corporate finance, investment banking) use a very wide subset of functions including:

• External database queries
• PivotTables (extremely important)
• Large, complex spreadsheets (30+ sheets in a single workbook)

Which Google Spreadsheets is unlikely to offer in the short term (although I’m willing to be proven wrong). Most importantly, data that ends up in the spreadsheets is of confidential and/or proprietary nature and wouldn’t be on an online service.

That doesn’t mean that Google Spreadsheets won’t have its users, it’s just not a threat to most of the core Excel customers.

Entry Filed under: Web 2.0, Excel, Google