Google actually made an interesting move yesterday in terms of how people can collaborate on the spreadsheets they create. If you take a look at the Share tab in one of your Google Spreadsheets you’ll notice a new option towards the bottom that’s new. With it you can share a spreadsheet that can be edited by anyone and everyone which, as Google OS points out, essentially makes this a wiki.
A feature like this is nice because users don’t need an account to collaborate on a spreadsheet. Unfortunately that also means that the URL for the document can easily be shared, and you could quickly start finding unwanted information popping up. I guess it’s fortunate that Google provides a rather extensive revision history so that in a single click you can go back to before the unwanted changes were made.
What I would really like to see from Google is a way to password protect a document without needing a username. That way you could distribute a password to, for example coworkers, without having to worry about the public stumbling across the document. And then you could also change the password at your own leisure. Now that would be perfect for some of the things that I’m working on.
Recent events make it seem as though Google has been showing some love to the Spreadsheets, because in the last few months they added offline support, introduced gadgets, and developed a sweet form system. I can’t wait to see what else they have in store for us!
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Tags: Google, Web Sites, Features, Google Docs, How To
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Editgrid has had shared with password protection for a year or two…. I feel like Google is playing catchup to Editgrid in many ways.
Bob
I hear ya. I think that most people just want an all-in-one online office suite. Having one service for spreadsheets, another for word processing, and so on would be a pain to manage.