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Wow, that was fast. I received my Google Spreadsheets invite about 20 minutes ago and I’ve been toying around with it for just a few min. The place where I am right now has spotty internet access, but I’ve been able to create a few sample spreadsheets and I must say, so far Google Spreadsheets rocks.

Will it replace Microsoft Excel? Maybe not, but there will certainly be a very large audience checking it out. I would be more than happy to say bye bye to Office upgrade fees and say hello to web based collaboration.

Google Spreadsheets is to launch as part of Google Labs on Tuesday according to CNET. At the time of this writing, there is a tour of features you can take over at the Google Spreadsheets sneak peek site which breaks down the features into: Creating, Sharing and Storing.

The recent purchase of Writely, a web based document editing service offering the benefits and features of MS Word caused quite a bit of speculation about Google’s intentions at going after Microsoft Office users.

Web based applications for document editing and sharing are definitely on the up and up. The “software as service” concept pioneered in part by salesforce.com has become a lot more mainstream. Wikis, internal blogs and other group information sharing services have become standard tools for many innovative and distributed workforce environments.