Spreadsheets in the Cloud - Not Ready Yet

Abstract

Cloud computing is a relatively new technology that facilitates collaborative creation and modification of documents over the internet in real time. Here we provide an introductory assessment of the available statistical functions in three leading cloud spreadsheets namely Google Spreadsheet, Microsoft Excel Web App, and Zoho Sheet. Our results show that the developers of cloud-based spreadsheets are not performing basic quality control, resulting in statistical computations that are misleading and erroneous. Moreover, the developers do not provide sufficient information regarding the software and the hardware, which can change at any time without notice. Indeed, rerunning the tests after several months we obtained different and sometimes worsened results.