Hands on: Plan with Google spreadsheets

Imagine you’re trying to plan a family reunion. Your parents have retired in Australia. Your children are spread around Europe. Great Uncle Fred is in Canada.

There are lists to be made, schedules to be planned, itineraries to be proposed and adjusted. All jobs for a spreadsheet. But how can you all review and amend it, working together at the same time? A practical solution is a Google workbook that can be shared around the world.

Although you can only work on a Google spreadsheet online, it’s possible to start by creating in Excel the forms or lists you need offline. Then go online, open a new Google spreadsheet, and import your workbook.

Are there limitations? There are only a few, really. The workbook can have up to 20 worksheets, providing all the worksheets together don’t use more than 10,000 rows, or 256 columns, or 50,000 used cells. Up to 20 spreadsheets can be opened by all approved users at one time.

Bear in mind that although you can start in Excel, and download a Google spreadsheet into Excel to use offline, the folks you share a Google spreadsheet with don’t have to have Excel on their computers. In fact, they don’t have to own a computer.

They can pop into an internet café and, if they have registered and you’ve approved them to participate, they can view a Google spreadsheet and amend it or send you comments in real time. This means that even if a computer is lost or damaged, or the hard drive on their PC crashes, any Google spreadsheets are safe and can be accessed any time anywhere.

Safe and sound
This raises the matter of security. It’s wise to recognise that anything of value that you expose on the internet could eventually become insecure, but for documents that are of no value to anyone else, this is a good scheme. You are given normal privacy by Google’s registration system. Both you and those you wish to share spreadsheets with can go to https://www.google.com/accounts and register. All that’s needed is an email address where you can be reached and a password.

After that, enter the language you wish to use, and your time zone, on the Settings page. Google documents can be written in 14 languages and the spell check supports these and 16 more. The time zone is needed for timestamps of your files, for histories of revisions, and so that time-related spreadsheet functions such as NOW() will work.

The Settings page also has a Spreadsheets tab but there were no options offered at the time of writing. This is very much a work in progress; in fact under the title, Google Spreadsheets, in Flyspeck Light, it says Beta.

Getting back to the example of a weekend family reunion, you can lay out the worksheets first in Excel offline and then upload them. If you are using Excel 2007, you can either Save as an Xls file, or Copy and Paste the data into a Google spreadsheet. Most formatting entered in Excel will be recognised by a Google spreadsheet.

If you don’t want to use Excel, you can go online and start a new Google spreadsheet. New formatting is easy to arrange using the buttons under the Edit tab, with a choice of fonts and a palette of colours for fonts and cell backgrounds.