Starting with Google Spreadsheets

Question

I've never used spreadsheets for anything more than a quick graph. I'd like to learn how to use spreadsheet formulas to their full extent and have been playing around on Google Spreadsheets.

There do not seem to be any thorough tutorials on Google Spreadsheets and even Google's documentation often makes references to Excel functionality without explaining it.

My question is, should I first learn to use 'advanced' formulas (say vlookups or ARRAYFORMULA on Google) spreadsheets on Excel and then move to Google spreadsheets? I'm not doing anything extraordinarily complicated, but I'd like to know some of the best practices when pulling information across sheets and reorganizing and filtering it using formulas (not macros).

-- EDITED to clarify my wish to use formulas, not macros

Answer 1

Excel spreadsheets have a programming language (Excel VBA, see Joel Spolsky) which is not in Google spreadsheets, so starting with Excel is probably not the path of joy.

You could start with some spreadsheet exercises, such as

1. Implement a bowling score chart using relative cell references
2. Implement a bowling score chart using ARRAYFORMULA
3. Implement a bowling league report where every team uses their own spreadsheet and your report imports all the data.
4. etc.

That would give you a feel for one of the problem domains for which Google spreadsheets are the right size and the right place: available-anywhere collaborative recording and summary.

Answer 2

There's a full API now for google spreadsheets.

Answer 3

Google is free, but very limited. Excel is powerful and fast (being a native desktop application), but expensive.

You should consider to download OpenOffice, which is free and fast.

Answer 4

Agreed - Open Office would be the way to go - there's a good tutorial here.

And being Java based, it runs on a number of platforms.

Answer 5

AFAICT, Google spreadsheets aren't programmable. both excel and OOo are, so if you want to learn about "spreadsheet programming", you'll get nowhere with Google.

OOo, in particular is programmable in Python, so it's a more structured platform for development. VBA OTOH is a very evolutioned BASIC, but still a big pain to do it right. (witness any excel accounting system slowly creeping towards unmaintanability)

personally, i'd like to do all the programming in a DB server (plus some scripting language), and use the spreadsheet as frontend (instead of a browser); but it seems that most 'integrationability' features mean just that it's easy to copy output from the DB to the spreadsheet, and sometimes back to the DB, none i've seen makes it 'live' data.