Juice analytics has a great article that’s making the rounds on in-cell graphing in Excel using simple formulas and the REPT function. Its very similar to the common HTML bargraphing mehod of stretching pixels using javascript to calculate their width. (Pop over there before reading further, since none of this will make sense if you’re unfamiliar with the foundation.) I decided to give the demo spreadsheet a shot in the online spreadsheets I use. Here are the results, for the interested.

Google Spreadsheet Painfully slow to open, easily a minute. PositiveNegative shows NaN in the negative space if there is a positive value. You can fix that by opening any negative field, editing it, and resaving. Dots doesn’t work; spaces are treated as regular HTML white space. This would likely carry over to the Gantt chart, but after a few worksheet changes, G Spreadsheets stops displaying content.

Thinkfree Online The Quick Edit view displays most spreadsheets correctly. Anything using spaces for layout (eg Dots, Gantt), will crap out, since this view is rendered as HTML. The spreadsheet works beautifully in the Java app. Overall, very fast and responsive.

Zoho Sheet Same HTML-related space problems as mentioned above. Column widths came in all screwy, but that wouldn’t be an issue if you were creating your own worksheets.