By Jeffrey the Barak

Slowly but surely, more and more of my computer time is moving off my computer and into the cloud. I have a fast business cable connection at home and work, so my cloud applications are usually as fast as my native apps, but today I passed a landmark so now is a good time to rant about it.

Today, Ladies and Gentlemen, I stopped using Microsoft Excel. Excel was the last and only Microsoft product that was in my daily life. I left the Windows world a few years ago to live on Planet Apple, a much more efficient place in my opinion, but hung onto Excel because it was the only product good enough to handle my databases and spreadsheets.

I tried several alternatives such as Numbers, Open Office Calc, Bento, and others, and I tried Google Spreadsheets, many times. As recently as November, Google Spreadsheets, part of Google Docs, failed to handle my requirements, but with the approaching launch of Google’s Chrome Operating System, the G Boys have been hard at it, and now I find it is up to pace with my needs.

So my email, my accounting, my complicated databases and my shopping cart system are all now in the cloud, as are the control panels for my various WordPress sites, including this one, and my shipping modules too. I can find the same daily working environment in any browser on any computer, anywhere there is a connection. With a wide screen and plenty of tabs, it’s all there on my desktop, wherever that might be. It’s quite a strange feeling actually, after two decades of Spreadsheet juggling, but hey, welcome to the future.