

Google Docs adds Pivot Table support - vmind
http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2011/05/summarize-your-data-with-pivot-tables.html

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snprbob86
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.

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

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Diabeetus
_since leaving Windows_

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kisielk
I believe he means Excel 2011 for Mac.

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

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th0ma5
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?

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pasbesoin
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.

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jfoutz
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.

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timtadh
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.

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tantalor
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.

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brianjolney
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!

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TY
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.

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melling
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.

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wladimir
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.

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kenjackson
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).

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swaits
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.

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systems
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

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lancewiggs
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.

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dbro
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

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smackfu
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.

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

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

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

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jungans
Please please please add something like MS Project...

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

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dr_win
congrats GDocs team!

