Google Spreadsheet
 

Google is working on a spreadsheet product that will be free. Apparently it is pretty primitive now but is available for limited testing.

You can sign up for the test here:

http://www.google.com/googlespreadsheets/try_out.html

Apparently they do want it to eventually rival excel in terms of functionality. One interesting feature it will have is the ability of many people from anywhere to access and work on the same spreadsheet at the same time.

Hmm, very interesting. I signed up. Might as well and see what it's all about. thank's for the link.

Hmm interesting approach; I wouldn't think that anyone would try to rival Excel...not because it's amazing but simply because it gets the job done.

I really think some interesting things are going to come out of the shared nature of this. I think you will see websites with information that are maintained by communities in a very sophisticated way as they all work on the same spreadsheet, for example.

Should be interesting when they get it into full form.

I imagine that could become very messy if collaboration is done in real time, making it an extremely complex undertaking, even for Google. While I think that could be beneficial, I think function programmability would be more useful and far simpler to implement.

Truth be told, although I am hopeful about this product, since it has advanced rather quickly since the spreadsheet was introduced you have to be a little skeptical. Excel has been around forever and is a very complex well thought out piece of software, which as compared to this online application is extremely complex. Although Google does have the money, talent, and resources to create a comparable online, Excel alternative why would they bother? Offline appllications still have more features then gmail and the service has been around for quite a while. That's not to say that the new spreadsheet program wouldn't be useful, but a rival to Excel, I don't think so.

I've used ThinkFree office for about a year now. It's basically the same idea implimented using java.
www.thinkfree.com

I believe it gives you a gig of online storage to store your documents. I use it to keep track of the disks in my case.