For a recent editorial project, a colleague and I had to enter reams of information into a spreadsheet that we both needed pretty constant access to. I've made no secret of my love for Google Apps, so I suggested that we use a Google spreadsheet as the container for all of this data. I knew that we'd be able to access the spreadsheet from any Internet-connected computer, that we'd be able to share the spreadsheet and chat about it, and that we'd be able to easily search on any keywords in the spreadsheet.

(OK, here, imagine the sound of a needle being violently scratched over a record, like the sound used in movies and elsewhere to indicate a shocking disruption of the action.)

Whoa! What? You mean I can't search on a Google spreadsheet? I can't search on the info that we entered into thousands of fields kind of haphazardly--because I knew I'd be able to search on data like I do in, say, Gmail? Or, for that matter, in Excel?

Luckily, the data wasn't totally unstructured, so we were able to find pretty much everything we needed in the shared spreadsheet by sorting and lots of page upping and downing (to use the technical terms). For the info we couldn't find, I exported the data to an Excel spreadsheet and used the Find function. Not much of a productivity enhancer.

I know Google has its Labs and its to-do lists for its various apps. And I guess I should have checked to make sure that the capability was there. But I was really surprised at this hole in Google Spreadsheets. I mean, come on: Google is synonymous with search, right?

I had a similar experience when I first started using Google Apps. I asked, in the article linked above, if anyone knew of an easy way to add multiple rows to the spreadsheet. I got a few snarky remarks, saying things such as, "Duh! Hit Insert then click on Row." Well, I knew that. What I wanted to do was add, like, 20 rows--just not one at a time.

I'm not sure exactly when the capability was added, but at some point I noticed that a little plus sign had appeared at the bottom of Google Spreadsheets. When I clicked on it, a box opened up in which I could insert the number of rows I wanted to add. It was progress, anyway. So, when a colleague recently asked me how to add columns to a Google spreadsheet, I said, "I've never done it with columns, but there's now a new feature that lets you add multiple rows. I imagine there's the same feature for adding columns. Look for a little plus sign at the right of the spreadsheet."

Well, the thing they say happens when you assume indeed happened. Turned out the little plus sign wasn't there. Sigh.

As frustrated as I was by the adding rows and columns issue, I thought I surely must be missing something when it came to Google Spreadsheets and search.

I asked our resident Google expert, Clint Boulton, what he knew about the issue. He told me it's on Google's to-do list, but he brought up the subject with Google Enterprise Product Manager Rishi Chandra. Chandra told Clint that there is search across Google Docs in general, but not inside spreadsheets themselves. Clint told me that Chandra thought it was good feedback and that it was one of a number of search tasks in the queue. Eventually, Clint recounted Chandra as saying Google wants to do universal search for any piece of content created in Google.

That would be really cool, but also something I would expect.