Following Google's announcement just yesterday that they are going to develop a full office suite for the web, they've just recently added a new feature to Google Spreadsheets: charts. This isn't quite your regular spreadsheet program, as it's still quite basic and was not much more than a portable way of storing data. But charts do a little bit more.
This does show that Google is continuing on to challenge the existence of full-blown applications, creating nearly equivalent web applications that are often just as functional as their standalone counterparts. And simple isn't always bad; one thing that Google has tried to keep fairly consistent is the user interface, which is usually quite user-friendly.
Google Spreadsheets definitely makes it easy to create a chart, and although doesn't have nearly as much capability as Excel's chart-maker, is pretty obviously the winner in terms of ease of use. PCWorld writes, "You select a range of data, click a pie-chart icon, and get a dialog box that lets you choose from five chart types (columns, bars, lines, pies, and scatter) with several variations apiece."
One thing that Google Spreadsheets is likely never going to be able to rival is the speed at which a standalone applications can run, and to be quite frank I think most of us would prefer to use Microsoft Office when it's available to us. But while this works fine when working in your regular environment, Google's suite of office applications becomes increasingly attractive for portable work.