Yesterday I made my first real foray into Google Documents. I’ve been recording my cycling mileage on Excel spreadsheets and thought it would be a good idea to back them up elsewhere. I noticed that Google has a spreadsheet application so I thought I’d check it out.
By and large the user interface is easy to figure out. It’s uncluttered. It took me a few minutes to find out how to do a few things, but it wasn’t too bad. There is a user help section which I did consult a couple times.
The spreadsheets I imported are saved in Office ’97 (yes, ancient). I’ve used three different designs over the past six years. I had conversion formatting issues with each of them (e.g., column width or dollar signs added to some of the numbers.) One year was completely messed up. Odd, since two similar sheets imported much better.
While I was in spreadsheet mode I decided to create a graph with the data. The task was fairly straightforward with the graph feature:
Two trends stick out to me:
- This shows the seasonal nature of cycling. In the winter it’s nasty and there’s not much daylight. Consequently, my winter monthly mileage is down as much as 50%.
- I stepped my riding up a level at the start of 2005 summer, which, not coincidentally, was when I upgraded my bike.
Overall I’m satisfied with Google Docs. It’s a nice tool for the cost (free). And it’s an easy way to share files with other people.