Paula Rojas Blog

Some of the advantages of working with Google’s spreadsheet application have already been mentioned. But if you suggest to your office manager or other supervisor that they start using this online service, you may meet with some resistance. For one thing, accountants and other financial officers are probably already using a spreadsheet application.

Then there’s another concern: security. It’s likely many of the records stored in your office’s existing spreadsheet applications are confidential in nature. You probably have names, addresses, and phone numbers of your own staff people, for one thing.

For another, you might use spreadsheets to store your company’s financial records and customer records, including credit card numbers that are sent to you in the course of doing business. The security concern is a valid one. Google protects your account with passwords, but if you use Google Docs & Spreadsheets as part of a domain, you may conceivably give password access to as many as 100 or more users.

It’s up to those users to manage their passwords carefully and avoid giving them out to unauthorized people. As Google says in its Help file page on security and privacy all spreadsheet files are private by default, and if you never give out the URL of a spreadsheet to anyone or never give another user access to a spreadsheet, no one will see it but you; spreadsheets cannot be found by searching for them on Google.

If you do plan to store sensitive information online using Google, you might want to either limit access to it to as small a number of individuals as possible, or instruct those people to guard their passwords as closely as they can. The other concern the fact that your financial officers might already be using other software isn’t necessarily negated by Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

It’s not an either-or situation. The ‘‘professionals’’ can still use Excel or other applications, but other staff people can use Google for sharing estimates, schedules, and other data. The same advantages presented by other Google ‘‘apps’’ also apply:

• The ability to access information from anywhere
• The familiar spreadsheet interface, which looks uncannily like Excel
• The fact that the application is available for free
• Because you’re using an online service, you don’t have to download the program or upgrade it as new versions come out
• Storing data online means you use up less disk storage space on your office’s servers

Besides that, your coworkers will find that Google Spreadsheets is accessible to anyone because it has a very easy-to-climb learning curve. You can learn how to perform the basic functions quickly and with a minimum of technical expertise.