Google

Thankfully, I don’t have cause to use Microsoft Excel much. My kids can produce pretty charts about the demographics of pet ownership in the classroom better and quicker than I can. Excel is a very powerful product but the sheer size and complexity of the software is just overwhelming which makes it difficult (for novices) to accomplish straightforward tasks. For example, people are kind enough to send me gargantuan, complex spreadsheets where I want to freeze the header row while scrolling data down to the sole point of interest on row 23,538....

What could be worse than forgetting to bookmark the obscure page you found that maps out the perfect walking tour of Venice ? Well I can think of one thing. Going on a lovely, romantic weekend city break and getting lost (and wet) in the narrow backstreets of Venice. Then I eventually find an Internet cafe but am horrified to discover that the computer is locked down and I can’t install Google Browser Sync....

Inevitably, Google enters the online spreadsheet market to provide competition for ThinkFree. No charts (yet) and limited invite only but it’s coming. As an aside, I don’t use Excel much. My kids are much more proficient at producing pretty, colourful pie charts and histograms than me. However, I also find it quite staggering that many sensible, intelligent adults spend their lives in Microsoft Excel. A gentleman once emailed me a spreadsheet and I hunted high and low across all tabs for any relevant table data, pretty charts and forumlae....

Important message to all you bloggers contemplating a migration to WordPress.com. Google has just launched Google Pages - a Web site builder with lots of ‘Looks’ and ‘Layouts’ available to choose from and a nice, friendly easy to use WYSIWYG interface. Like all Web 2.0 applications, it is still a beta version. However, this seems an odd product to launch in 2006. As Mark E. Smith once said ‘Are you still doing what you did 5 years ago - Yeah ?...

Tonight’s Money Programme (' ‘The world according To Google’) on BBC2 was about the history, the success and the possible future diversification of the popular search engine, Google. Now I use Google a lot and to me it is an excellent, fast, free service. I can hardly ever recall clicking on an ad that was presented alongside a search (even if I am actually looking to buy something). I use Google Groups for searching for technical information as someone, somewhere at sometime has probably encountered the same problem as me and better, someone, somewhere at sometime has probably, kindly, provided the solution....

Google have launched an online RSS Reader. Like most developments from Google, this looks very professional and fits in with their rapidly growing suite of software products. Although I currently use Thunderbird for reading (a very limited number of) RSS sources and blogs, the use of a Web based service to manage all my information sources, accessible from anywhere, is appealing. I experimented by setting up one source (BBC News) and one thing about the interface immediately struck me like a thunderbolt !...