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?
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?
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!'"
there's a maximum of 400k cells, 256 columns/sheet
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.
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.
Piping it through Google docs removes like 90% of the deadweight markup and makes it more compliant while retaining nearly all of the formatting.