Blogs by Magic

Thoughts & ideas from a digital magician.

Microsoft Excel is slowly becoming obsolete

The other day Google released an API for their Fusion Tables project. For those that don't know what Fusion Tables is, well...

What is Fusion Tables? A product launched recently in Google Labs, Fusion Tables is a free service for sharing and visualizing data online. It allows you to upload data, share and mark up your data with collaborators, merge data from multiple tables, and create visualizations like charts and maps.

It's quite remarkable in its simplicity. I only wish this had been available last year when I needed it. You can read the original announcement about Fusion Tables from earlier this summer on the Google Research blog here.

Fusion Tables is a pretty cool product in its own right, and with an API it becomes an even more robust utility for quick trend analysis and a host of other quantitative endeavors. It's pretty amazing how easy Google has made it to create visualizations that would have otherwise taken hours to create by other methods.

But I think what's really remarkable is how Google is shaping their web-based products to challenge Microsoft. Excel has long been the de-facto standard for working with small data sets, but Google may actually be capable of challenging the status quo with a combination of Google Docs and Fusion Tables. While they aren't (yet) a replacement for Microsoft Excel by any means, together they offer a large part of the day-to-day functionality while providing a considerable amount of added value and unique functionality that Microsoft can't deliver on.

There are two things I'd really like to see in the future from Google:

  1. Better integration points between Google Docs, Fusion Tables and Google Analytics. Imagine a flow where you can merge Google Analytics data with sales, inventory, et al. data in a few easy steps. Powerful.
  2. The ability to run (even if limited) regression analysis. Right now Google Docs supports LINEST and a few other tools, but it's pretty limited.

Every day I find that I need Microsoft products a little bit less. And it's not just that I don't need them – I don't even want to use them anymore, because solutions like Google Docs and Fusion Tables are simply better, faster, and inherently easier to work with in a collaborative environment.

A new e-commerce engine

As you may have seen, the Google Docs blog announced a preview of the Google Checkout store gadget back in July. The Google Checkout store gadget, available in Google Labs, allows you to create an online store with inventory managed from a Google spreadsheet and payments accepted through Google Checkout.

Since then, our engineers have been exploring ways to simplify store creation. Today, we're excited to introduce a new feature for the store gadget: a wizard that streamlines the store creation process. By automating the manual steps in the original instruction guide, the new store gadget wizard should leave you with even more time to focus on your business.

As with the original release, no complicated coding or technical tasks are required, and you can get your first online store up-and-running in under five minutes. The new wizard helps you embed the store on Blogger, Google Sites, iGoogle, and other websites. We hope you'll find the new version more intuitive and enjoyable to use.
via googlecheckout.blogspot.com

Building a website is becoming easier and easier. You don’t need to know how to program to build a website. Now you don’t even need to know how to program to build applications or online storefronts. I particularly like Google’s approach of creating web-tools based on the way non-programmers think. It says a lot about their philosophies around user experience.

Let’s say that someone wants to build an online store. They aren’t thinking about what that looks like in terms of database schema , relationships, and tables. They never really give thought to the idea of checkout flow. No, the average person thinks of their spreadsheet which contains last month’s inventory. They can’t figure out why they can’t just upload their spreadsheet and a store gets formed. Why not build a tool that actually lets users do this?

It’s easier said than done, but that’s exactly what Google has done with Docs + Checkout. This project may seem like a small one for a giant like Google, but it’s actually pretty significant what they are doing. They are making normal spreadsheets functional. They’ve also got a form creator that lets people create polls and field email addresses for newsletters. They even have samples up that allow you to create Google Maps applications with Google Docs Spreadsheets: Spreadsheets Powered Map.

It wasn’t too long ago when the only way of creating a store online was by coding something yourself, using generic software which was terrible, or spending hundreds of dollars on proprietary software that was just slightly less terrible. Now you can do pretty much everything... from a spreadsheet... for free.

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