Almost everyone uses a spreadsheet and document editor at some point, but Microsoft's Office is often overkill for those who just want fast and simple access to some basic tools.

Now Google has edged into the gap with an online document processor and spreadsheet tool called - with no apparent imagination or flair - Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

In theory, online working should be an easy sell. Imagine being able to access your work - and indeed to continue your work - from anywhere that has online access. Imagine giving selective access to your documents, and also allowing others to make comments or direct changes. Imagine being able to publish any document to a unique URL with a few mouse clicks.

So far so good. But in practice Google Docs is very much a minimal solution. Paragraph styles, symbols, tables, fonts and colours are included. But more complex tools such as Track Changes, page footnotes, and other more advanced page layouts aren't there.

There's also no word count tool, which makes Docs almost useless for professional writing. It's a similar story with the Spreadsheet tool, which lacks more advanced maths functions, charting and graphing, and other features that many Excel users find essential.

File sizes

There are also size restrictions. Each document is limited to 500KB, with up to 2MB per embedded image. Users are allowed 1,000 documents and 1,000 images. Spreadsheets are limited to 50,000 cells in up to 10,000 rows and 256 columns, spread across 20 sheets.

That's clearly more than enough for most projects, although import of existing files is limited to 1MB, which is big, but not quite big enough to deal with larger sheets.

These limits may not matter in theory, but in practice both Google applications can feel slow, even over a broadband connection. Eventually, online speeds will start to match the speed of a local hard disk, but until then there's going to be a significant delay whenever you try to open a document, even if it's simple and small.

Larger documents, especially those needing plenty of bandwidth for images, are simply too unwieldy to work with online unless you have access to ultra fast broadband speeds of 10MB or better.