I just got my hands on a Google Spreadsheets invite. It's a nice application that's easy to use and collaborate with others. You can easily export/import Excel docs, format cells, merge cells, utilize dozens of formulas and much more. It also supports sharing too. It lacks charting.
Unfortunately Google left out search and filtering. For a company that's says they're all about search this is inexcusable. You should be able to easily search inside a single spreadsheet or across all of your spreadsheets, but you can't. That's the big difference between Writely, Gmail, Google Calendar and this product. All of these Google products have search at their core. It's shocking they could put a high profile product out there like Spreadsheets without search. This limits its use for media and customer databases.
I would also like to see Google add the ability to share spreadsheets with the world and also have these docs talk to each other. They could also be made searchable, a la Google Notebook, so that people can find databases that others have built and plug into them. In theory if Google were to do this it would turn Spreadsheets into the world's largest relational database.
Here are some screen grabs I took from Google Spreadsheets...
Technorati Tags: Google Spreadsheets, Google
