Google Docs adds Pivot Table support | Hacker News Reader

Google Docs adds Pivot Table support

googledocs.blogspot.com

141 pointsvmind49 comments

Awesome. I'm a big fan of Google's feature-by-feature, slow-and-steady approach to competing with MS Office. Excel is the only application that I really miss since leaving Windows (Numbers & Mac Excel just don't feel right) and Google Docs is creepy up on it a little bit at a time.

Excel 2011 feels just fine - get the latest version. Excel 2007 was slow as molasses, unbearable.

since leaving Windows

I believe he means Excel 2011 for Mac.

There is no Excel 2011 on Windows, so it pretty much has to be the Mac.

Yeah, just got it the other day. Haven't gotten to play with it much yet. The one thing I have noticed is that it still doesn't play nice with Spaces. It does not respect that I disabled the option for "When switching to an application, switch to a space with an open window for the application." Drives me nuts.

2011 still doesn't support external data sources.

What about Office.live.com?

At this moment, there is no experience or feature parity. Many of the Live apps require IE + Silverlight to be collaborative (though I bet they do away with this, it seems MS is moving away from Silverlight for some things.)

Often when I mention this, an MS person says, "you don't need Silverlight + IE." It's technically true. It will revert to a "dumb" mode if you don't use that.

Also, some of the web versions, even w/IE + Silverlight, don't have realtime group editing. (Like the Word-esque app.)

This year they launched Office365, which they market as their cloud offering. It does have some hosted features, but the client they want you to use is not a web browser, but local copies of Office.

Web-based collab tools from MS are a moving target. They've switched their branding and strategy 4 times in the past two years. I don't think they're on the right track yet. They need to just bite the bullet and do a pure web offering. They know how to do it. It's not lack of ability. They just don't want to hurt the goose that lays the golden egg. Can't blame 'em. But then they can't blame us for diving deeper into Google Docs, which gets more interesting and flexible every week.

I tried Office 365 a few weeks ago. It's a disaster. I encountered:

1) Print Preview cleared the contents of my document

2) Sometimes input would randomly stop being accepted.

3) Loading the app took forever.

4) Numerous tab crashes.

5) The signup experience was a many-step cluster fuck. I was emailed a password and it said "Your new or updated account information." Seriously? You can't even get the words "Welcome" in your email subject?

6) Hilariously sparse UI. They forced the Ribbon UI on it, but they don't support all the features, so you spend a bunch of time trying to find things that you new were on a particular tab simply moved/resized to fill more space and not look so sparse.

To be fair, they don't officially support Chrome, but they do support both FireFox and Safari, so Chrome shouldn't be that broken.

It's a beta, and they rolled out support for Chrome just this week.

"Google Docs is creepy [sic] up on it"

Is that a typo or a subtle commentary on Google's privacy policy?

Would Google Docs Spreadsheet PLEASE match and create the same shortcuts that are used is MS excel? It would be interesting to see if the engineers working on Google Docs Spreadsheet were ever MS Excel power users.

You might like Gnumeric. It has almost all the functionality of Excel 2003.

This is fairly huge. Anyone who is sufficiently advanced or works long enough with Excel sees it as a lot of stuff around an amazing analytic engine. I wonder if they'll have large dataset support?

From personal experience, I'd say there's more to its "analytics engine" aspect than just pivot tables. (Not that you necessarily meant there was not.) Although it is a hearkening cry for many... "intermediate" level users as well as a significant tool for advanced users.

If people can pivot sufficiently, this is going to provide some significant competition to Excel from the perspective of many reporting demands.

I've already observed Google Doc's word processing component exceeding Word in ease of use to get to an actual, acceptable final result, for non-technical users. At that point, I really started to wonder how long it would be until Docs ate Microsoft's lunch with respect to the office suite market.

A big, conservative anchor still being data privacy and hosting. There's a lot of stuff people (still) simply can't/won't put into someone else's cloud/computers.

Collaboration alone is worth a ton. Even if the document is stuck in word for formatting at the end, docs makes it ridiculously easy to pass around edits.

So true. If I need to co-write a paper or presentation I either use Latex and Git (for serious work) or Google Docs for one off stuff. Nothing beats Latex for writing something really lengthy, but the setup time is too much for quick 1-2 page documents.

Case in point, in order to convert a .doc file to html was a nightmare from Word (last used 2007 and 2008 on Win/Mac) - this is especially useful if posting on craigslist/certain blogs.

Piping it through Google docs removes like 90% of the deadweight markup and makes it more compliant while retaining nearly all of the formatting.

According to this: http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=37603

there's a maximum of 400k cells, 256 columns/sheet

By no means is 400,000 cells a "big dataset". I would put the dividing line somewhere near 2 million rows.

Disclaimer: I work for Zoho.

Zoho Sheet (http://sheet.zoho.com) and Zoho Reports (http://reports.zoho.com) have pivot tables since 2008. While Zoho Sheet can support 1 million cells, Zoho Reports has customers having 15-20 million rows.

I don't work for Zoho, and I'll echo the support here. Zoho's product suite is great. As a user, I really like the way their product tie into each other. Have built a number of internal corporate projects on Zoho and have been quite happy. Customer support is surprisingly good too, and willing to do custom stuff like create special billing for our purposes that don't fit their normal pricing.

"I wonder if they'll have large dataset support?"

Hmmmm... That could make for a very interesting possible future - Google introduces sophisticated data mining/visualisation techniques to the masses for free, then allows you to run the same techniques across multi datacentre sized clusters of mapreduce machines on petabyte sized public databases...

I wonder what unexpected results might emerge from that?

huge electrical bills.

Yeah, they'll get that, not exacly unexpected though, and I wonder what the marginal cost of running huge speculative mapreduce jobs on "spare" server resources add up too?

I honestly think there's some world-changing insight hiding in data lurking idly across Googles datacenters - which just needs someone curious enough to turn the right datasets round the right way and ask the right question...

What's that old science gag? Something along the lines of "Amazing discoveries are more likely to be preceeded by 'Hmmm, that's strange' rather than 'Eureka!'"

When I interned at Google in 2006, one of my side projects was an all-JavaScript Pivot Table tool for internal analytics. I doubt any of that survived to present day, but it's nice to imagine.

One of the few reasons I've held out on excel - pivot tables seem to be such a great way to use SQL like queries on spreadsheet data. Excellent!

Agreed, this is "a great success": my family budget can finally move from Excel/Dropbox to Google Docs.

On a more serious note, this does open up some interesting possibilities for Business Intelligence "in da cloud". Pivot tables coupled with data fed through Google Docs API can resolve quite a few basic reporting needs of my small business customers.

Google should create a turbo-charged version of Docs that requires Chrome, Firefox 4, or other sufficiently advanced browser. If Linux can boot in a browser, Google can make a much better spreadsheet for people on better browsers.

Like Chrome, they can offer a different channel. It might even encourage people to install Firefox/Chrome.

Agreed; The spreadsheet is pretty nice already, but Docs is still an extremely limited word processor. I mean, lack of custom named styles, who can do without those? And there's more of those pretty straightforward features which even a simple wordpad application can do but not Docs.

What are the data sources? Can I source from SQL Server, Oracle, DB2? OLAP engines? If not, while still better than nothing, not really a first class solution for most of my users. But great for soccer moms (seriously -- our team mom will flex on you with pivot tables for the soccer team).

Yah, it totally doesn't target the 0.1% of people who do this! HOW LAME IS GOOGLE WITH THEIR FREE-TO-USE SOFTWARE!?!?!

In all seriousness, this is much more useful than to just soccer moms.

pivot table is probably the most interesting interface to BI cubes, I've hardly seen them used elsewhere!

so i can't really agree on your assumption that "other data sources" would represent 0.1%, in most business places i would say "other data sources" represent 100% of the usage

Free online tools to do pivot tables on spreadsheet data. Sounds like small business to me. People who already have their data in spreadsheets and don't want to hire a BI engineer to install SQL, Analysis Services, construct cubes, reports etc etc

Not true at all. I could trade anecdotes but pivot tables are an essential tool in the analyst toolkit, without requiring external data.

Great opportunity for someone to develop and share a standard spreadsheet for capturing and reporting usefully on iTunes appstore data.

A bit of an aside, but because something is free does not mean it is above criticism nor does it mean you can't bitch about things it doesn't do.

Erm, it's a spreadsheet program, so the data source is your spreadsheet. So if you can get your SQL data into a Google Spreadsheet, you can make a pivot table out of it.

Excel can access other data stores such as databases using ODBC.

There's a number of ways to get data in and out of Google Docs to sync with enterprise services. Start with the Docs API and Google Apps Script API.

You can import public JSON/XML/CSV/HTML(and other) data.

You can connect/import private stuff with the Secure Data Connector, though I don't know all the types supported.

http://code.google.com/securedataconnector/docs/1.3/overview...

You can get everything out w/the API, too.

For exploring data sets, Google's fusion tables are useful. https://sites.google.com/site/fusiontablestalks/

some support for filtering and grouping

250MB data size limit

nice mapping capabilities

I can't imagine how I used Excel before I learned pivot tables, and it still makes me appear fairly godlike to my co-workers.

Can't find the 'pivot table' option from my account. They said they are rolling it out, any one else able to use it?

I've got it, though I don't really know how to use them yet.

Almost ready for primetime. Keep up the good work Google.

Please please please add something like MS Project...

Just in case you didn't know there is an open source version: http://openproj.org/

congrats GDocs team!

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