Google has been silently adding services to its already impressive portfolio despite rumours. I had heard about Docs & Spreadsheets some time back when Docs was still Writely. When I had visited it the integration with Google was going on and they had closed the access for the time being. I initially was skeptical about the power of web-based office suite and I still think that there will be limitations to what it can do (at least for the time being).

I saw the link for Docs & Spreadsheets by chance when I was chatting with one of my friends and browsing at the same time. I saw the link for Docs & Spreadsheets on the Gmail page in the top left corner where all the services are mentioned and immediately started out to explore. I was talking about creating and maintaining a contact list with my friend for another website project that we are working on. I was initially thinking in lines of everyone maintaining their own lists and then someone compiling it all together to become a master list. When I saw Docs & Spreadsheets, I immediately grasped it's power and created a template spreadsheet and shared it with him.

Yes, that's the power of this service from Google. I can collaborate my stuff with people I am working with who might be (and are in reality) half-way across the globe and maintain up to date information with a single version. This also allows me to upload spreadsheets, documents from various formats up in Google upto a size of 500 KB. Current supported formats for documents are HTML, plain text (*.txt), MS Word (*.doc), Rich Text Format (*.rtf), OpenDocument Text (*.odt), Staroffice(*.szw). The supported formats for spreadsheets are Comma Separated Values (*.csv), Microsoft Excel (.xls) files and OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods).

It does not give you the full power of the MS Office suite as yet. Like I cannot center align my text in cells in the spread sheets. I cannot merge cells vertically. I don't know yet the power of formulae, but I guess it would be sufficient for most tasks. I have not yet explored Docs so I will not comment anything on that.