Google Spreadsheets Blocked in China?

While we may have created a few dodgy budgets at RightSite, we still haven’t figured out how to create a subversive spreadsheet. Despite this, it seems that while Google docs are accessible in China today, any of the spreadsheets that you may have created are not.

At this time, we are able to access the main Google docs page (docs.google.com), and access to text documents seems fine. However, the majority of attempts to access spreadsheets created in Google are futile. We are also unable to create new spreadsheets through Google.

We say the majority of attempts because my assistant was able to access one of our crucial spreadsheets this morning, which we downloaded from Google and then uploaded to Dropbox.

Since Google Sites (which we use for our RightSite Wiki) is still blocked we will have to migrate our wiki over to Zoho‘s wiki app as soon as we have the chance.

No idea why we were able to score this sporadic access, but if you can pry your precious spreadsheets out from behind the GFW then Dropbox is a good stopgap measure for document sharing. It doesn’t like having multiple users editing at one time, but is a good solution for less active sharing of docs and provides a good revision history.

We will let you know if things come back on line.