Internet giant Google has fired another salvo in its ever-escalating competition with software titan Microsoft by unveiling a preliminary version of Google Spreadsheets, an online application which offers basic spreadsheet functions and simple data sharing capabilities.
For now, Google Spreadsheets is an invitation-only, preliminary product from Google Labs: although interested users can sign up to use and test the program, it’s not generally available to the public.
Google Spreadsheets offers basic spreadsheet functionality, offering traditional rows and columns in which users can store and organize numbers and text, as well as perform various calculations and manipulations. Google Spreadsheets supports changing number formats, column sorting, and basic formulas; users can also upload data to Google Spreadsheets in either CVS or Excel format, and Google says formatting and formulas will come through intact. Google Spreadsheets’ feature set currently does not come close to matching Microsoft Excel
