Thread: Word processing tool

Apart from the word processing tool, Google Docs includes a spreadsheet and a tool for creating presentations. The spreadsheet is extremely powerful. It can import Microsoft Excel documents, even if they contain multiple worksheets with cross-references between the sheets. All the spreadsheets we imported looked identical to the originals and worked perfectly, although it's important to note that Google Docs doesn't support macros.



As in Excel, graphs can be created from figures on a worksheet, and Google Docs goes one step further by allowing so-called gadgets to be incorporated into worksheets, too. There are lots of these to choose from, and they're capable of doing stuff that Excel users can only dream of, such as turning boring figures into panoramic charts, instrument-style gauges and dynamic maps.

The spreadsheet module responds nimbly to mouse and keyboard commands, and the only time we felt restricted by working via the web was when performing formatting operations such as changing column widths, where each has to be manually adjusted by dragging its boundaries instead of being changed automatically as part of a group.