Prompted by a recent WSJ article on Google’s online software ambitions, I signed up for Google Docs & Spreadsheets to give the so-called low-end Office a test run.

Being web-based, Google Spreadsheets has one advantage over PC-based Office documents right off the bat, which is that you can collaborate on documents, which is definitely a huge weakness with Excel.

As any Excel user has experienced, when you try to open a spreadsheet that someone else has already opened, the options are usually to open a Read Only version, or to open a Read Only version (and be notified when the user exits), both of which suck, as options go. Of course there’s the equally annoying working in two different copies simultaneously, which inevitably leads to headaches later on.

So what’s a professional Excel user to do?

Well, if your hope is to start using Google Spreadsheets in place of Excel at work, you will probably be disappointed. Though Google has tricked out its Google Spreadsheets product with many of the preset functions that you know and love in Excel, the more advanced functions don’t seem to work (for instance, you can do a VLOOKUP but I couldn’t seem to make a SUM(IF()) work).

The functions menu, in fact, looks very similar to the Excel menu (Insert > Functions), where they are grouped in categories like “Math”, “Financial”, “Logical”, “Date” etc.

My main gripe has to do with navigation. The process of entering a formula is pretty agonizing. For instance, if you select a cell, then type a “=” or a “+” to begin a formula, you cannot use the arrow buttons to then navigate to the cell you want to reference. You have to CLICK on the cell. Yes, that’s right, I said use the mouse.

Also, you can add sheets to your spreadsheet, but then you have to click to navigate between tabs, which is almost nauseating for people who spend most of their days Ctrl + Page Uping or Ctrl + Page Downing.

This navigation related limitations alone are enough to not make me want to use this, even for personal reasons (yes I use spreadsheets for personal reasons.) The odd thing is, when you’re not trying to enter in a formula, you can use the arrow buttons (and Enter button) to navigate around the screen.

I think we’ve pretty much ruled out that this can’t be used in a professional setting, but the ultimate dealbreaker is that I can’t imagine that corporations would feel at all comfortable that their highly sensitive data would be stored somewhere else besides their own servers. Though if Google comes out with a hosted version of the product, then I guess that problem goes away.

So, what can this be used for?

Well Google Spreadsheets does allow you to save .xls files, so you could always work on a spreadsheet locally, then upload to share. Although when I tried to upload a spreadsheet with some autofilters on top, it wouldn’t accept it, so my sense is that spreadsheets containing non-supported features just aren’t upload-able. Another blow. And when I tried to upload a sheet with a SUM(IF()) function it did so, successfully, but then stripped the sheet of its formulas.

One last cool feature: Google also generates a personalized email that you can use to email files versus uploading them manually, which is quite nice when it actually take spreadsheets with semi complicated features.

Verdict: Fine for very basic spreadsheets that you really need to share others.