F2 :: Form & Function

A few months ago I took some time to play around with Writely. My curiosity was two-fold: it seemed like a pretty cool tool, but more importantly the organization I work for was (and still is) in the midst of a SharePoint roll-out and I was interested in researching other collaboration options. Well, since that time Google has acquired the product and has extended it, adding spreadsheets to the mix.

Now, my adoration of Google has been expressed here before so I may be a bit biased, but this is just awesome! Honestly, I’m not even sure where to begin listing what makes this so great. Is it the fact that its use doesn’t require any special software (since it’s browser-based)? Is it the relative ease of use (since most people are comfortable with browser-based tools)? Is it the cross-platform nature (once again, due to it being browser-based)? Is it the cost (FREE!)? Is it the ability to invite collaborators who don’t have Google accounts? Is it the fact that it’s not a Microsoft product?

Maybe that last one is a little unfair. But I’m sure you could find plenty of your own reasons to love these products (like the fact that you can download your document in HTML, RTF, Word, OpenOffice, or PDF format, or that you can insert funky lookup functions — GoogleLookup(”Baltimore”, “population”), GoogleFinance(”FXE”), etc. — into your spreadsheets).

BTW, I’m not putting this in the Form category, but it’s still in beta (is that the Web 2.0 perpetual beta?) and chances are they’ll bring some folks in to pretty-up the interface once they’ve ironed-out any functionality kinks.