Online versus Desktop
Web-based spreadsheets do not in general depend on a particular operating system or similar constraints and are therefore generally more portable by their nature than desktop applications.
Collaborative spreadsheets
Generally, online spreadsheets offer spreadsheet sharing and public sharing as part of their features which enables collaboration between multiple users.
Remote data update
Some on-line spreadsheets provide remote data update allowing data values to be extracted from other users' spreadsheets even though they may be inactive at the time.
Gnumeric (listed below as a desktop spreadsheet) is also used as the "back-end" processor in at least one on-line spreadsheet application (Editgrid).
Online spreadsheets
The following tables only provide a comparison of desktop spreadsheet applications.
For a list and links to comparisons of online (web-based) spreadsheets, see List of online spreadsheets.
Google spreadsheets
Google spreadsheets can be accessed from the documents window Google docs. To create a spreadsheet, the user must create an account.
Once with an account, the user can create a spreadsheet from scratch, or import data from an external spreadsheet or other sources. An example spreadsheet can be found here.
The spreadsheet has the capability of being read and worked on directly by using a web link. If the originating author elects that option, multiple authors can work on the same spreadsheet.
The capabilities of the spreadsheet have been perceived to be quite limited in comparison to, for example, Microsoft Excel. Google spreadsheet does not allow the use of named variables, and until recently had nothing comparable to Excel's programming feature (Visual Basic for Applications), but now Google Spreadsheets supports Javascript-based formulas that are quite powerful and expressive.
Desktop spreadsheets
General
Operating system support
The operating systems the software can run on natively (without emulation).
Import/export capabilities
This table gives a comparison of what file formats each spreadsheet can import and export. "Yes" means can both import and export.
Spreadsheet comparison tools
Looking for changes in spreadsheets or checking to see if two copies of a spreadsheet have identical content can be a mind-numbing exercise, especially for the larger and more complex spreadsheets. For Microsoft Excel, at least, the data file is amended each time the file is opened, even if there are no actual changes in the spreadsheet itself. For this reason; using file comparison will always show differences if the two files have different viewing (file opened) histories, even if the contents are identical. The following tools are helpful to find if there are any actual differences between different spreadsheet files.
See also
References
