Entirely coincidentally I have progress reports today on two parts of the Google "Office Suite"

Google Spreadsheets

I used the Google Spreadsheets beta for real today. I could have used Excel or something else because what I was doing was very simple, but I thought I'd try the google online spreadsheet tool and I'm pleased to say that it worked well. It was pretty intuitive and about the only thing I missed was the possibility to create a pie chart.

Verdict: definitely worth the price (free), more usage may show up problems.

Writely (Google word processor)

I also saw from the Inquirer that Writely - the online word processor that google bought - is now reopened to new trial users so I played with that too. There were a couple of minor oddities that were easy to get used to and one major one that wasn't quite so simple. The minor ones were not much different to learning any other application and aren't worth commenting on as I didn't even need to test the online help to figure them out. The major one was rather more annoying, but was also resolved. The major one involves the fact that Writely (unlike Google Spreadsheets) has a very limited number of browsers (and operating systems) that it is willing to support and that excludes SeaMonkey, which is my preferred Browser/email client.

Fortunately, however, a little digging allowed me first to identify a way to spoof the browser's user agent to Writely and then find an even easier way - just adding "browserok=true" to the URL.

Verdict: slightly more irritating that the spreadsheets but equally good in general and also worth what it costs.

Overall the "office suite" clearly isn't. It is two separate applications with little or nothing in common. Both offer the prospect of collaboration (which I will try) but neither is integrated with google's email (gmail) client even though to my mind that would be ideal. On the other hand this really is a series of semi-beta products so this sort of integration may well come along with time.

Writely seems slightly better at importing/exporting documents but it is also a bit unclear to me how it relates to the Google Page Creator, which seems to be a web/HTML specific version of exactly the same thing.