Your the treasurer of a non profit organization and it's time to prepare the annual budget.  In years past this has been a challenge.  Your executive committee isn't the most technically savvy bunch.

A couple of them don't even have Microsoft Excel.  Of course being a number crunchier, or  at least playing one in your organization, you depend on a spreadsheet.  You spend hours in Excel getting all your formula's right and balancing the income and expenses.

Now you are ready to share.  So you email a copy to Exec members who have Excel.  You PDF for those that don't.  Off it goes and everyone has feedback.  Your VP faxes back a print out of the PDF with her changes.  By the way she can't add, but what is a zero or two between friends.  The others edit your spreadsheet and send it back, of course one forget to attach it to the e-mail.  Now how do you merge that all together make it work?  More hours adding all the changes, just to send it out again. 

Enter Google Spreadsheets; part of Google Docs.  Which is included in Google Apps for Domains,  have I mentioned I like Google Apps for Domains?

So here is what our budget looks like in Excel, you can download it if you would like.

 
Now we need to upload it to Google Docs.  There quite few ways to do this,  but for this demo we will use the Google Docs web interface. We open our web browser and go to Google Docs for our domain.  For this demo I am using Google Docs associated with NonProfitITDept.com.  So I navigated to http://docs.nonprofitITDept.com/.  Obviously your URL will be different. 

Then I simply login

Press upload from the menu bar.

And here is our spreadsheet ready to be shared and edited.  The formatting was maintained, but more importantly so where all the formulas.

Now we click on the share tab and enter the email address of those we would like to share with. 

There are many more features of this application that I have not covered.  Hopefully this will get you started and can experiment with Google Spreadsheets.