Google Docs Spruces Up Its Spreadsheet Import Functionality

Today, Google Docs came out with some awesome (for many people, very basic and essential) importing features for spreadsheets.

You can see the options for yourself, below.

Google Docs keeps advancing, wooo!!!

To me, one of the most promising advances is the "Separator character" feature, more commonly referred to as a data delimiter.  In English, a delimiter just means I can organize, group, parse, and separate data based on a specific criterion.

Another way to think of it would be to use the word "discrimination."  I can tell certain data apart because of something that separates them; I see a line and say, "Everyone to the right of the line, go to group A, everyone to the left of the line, go to group B."

For now, this feature in Google Docs' spreadsheets looks fairly embryonic:  it lacks some basic import functionality (described at the unofficial Google News here), and, so far as I can tell, is incapable of delimiting the data in a particular column - I relished this feature in Excel and long for its availability in spreadsheets.

At the end of the day, I'm happy to see Docs rolling out more and more capabilities.