This post highlights the important features Google has brought into it's Drive tool (formerly Google Docs and Spreadsheets) which has made online collaboration easier than before and enabled the use of Spreadsheets as a serious project management tool.
Without going into obvious features, what I would like to highlight is the fact that Google Drive not supports Pivoted spreadsheets. This means that while you maintain your raw data, you can also auto generate elegant status reports with all the power of pivots. An example report for one of my active project is here:
Since the spreadsheet is on the cloud so multiple collaborators can work on it simultaneously. Additionally
- you can have some people with only viewing rights
- comments based discussion on specific action items
- highlighting and grouping using conditional formatting
- usage of filters to see content
- Use across OSes
Overall, the limitations of Google Docs and Spreadsheets when compared to M S Excel for a general user seemed to be addressed royally.