iRows Absorbed by Google

Here we go again. Great big Google has hired the creators of iRows, a wonderful online spreadsheet. Consequently, iRows will shut down on December 31. A message on the iRows site urges users to save their spreadsheets and upload them to Google Spreadsheets. Fair enough, I suppose. Here's the problem: Google Spreadsheets are currently technically inferior to iRows (although that will eventually change). I noticed this today when I went to update a spreadsheet I used to track the gas mileage I'm getting in my car. When the user opens an existing spreadsheet in Google, instead of presenting a complete grid, Google only displays the smallest rectangular region bounding the cells that contain data. In order to add a row or column, then, the user has to right click on the mouse button and select the appropriate item from the popup menu. Next, I discovered that Google Spreadsheets won't accept my preferred date format (MM/DD/YY) when I enter a new date. The Formatting options don't even offer this format. Instead, the best Google can do is to affix the century on the year (MM/DD/YYYY). Google also has not implemented a feature to enable users to use the mouse to select a group of cells and drag to a new, adjacent group of cells, filling the new cells with incremented cell formulas. To be sure, one can achieve the same result by cutting and pasting, but that's a more cumbersome process than the old drag-and-drop method. Finally, Google offers no options for freezing panes (that is, rows and columns), enabling the user to scroll the rest of the page while maintaining, say, column and row headers. Perhaps Google will substitute iRows code for its own. In the mean time, however, Google Spreadsheets is, compared to iRows, a second- or third-class application.