Google Spreadsheet Chokes

Google spreadsheets has a useful view mode called Simple List View. As of today, you can access it using the List item on the View menu. (It was accessible differently earlier).

Only that Google forces you to the list view when you have a large number of viewers. They have worded it differently, saying you will be automatically redirected to list view if there are more than 50 users viewing it.

It shows a link to Go to spreadsheet view, but clicking on that just refreshes the page.

Alright, this makes sense, Google may have issues handling more than 50 concurrent threads trying to modify the same cell, and have pro-actively restricted that, even though the chances of that happening for a 10 cells by 10 cells sheet is one in a Untrigintillion, that is 10 to the power 96!

If that was too large a number, let me present a smaller one: the chances of 5 out of 50(or any number) users accessing the same cell in a 10 by 10 sheet is one in a million. Multiply this with the chances of a Google spreadsheet being shared with more than 5 people, which I assume is one in a thousand, and a simple math shows the chance as one in a billion! The larger the sheet gets, the smaller the probability. For example, for a 20 by 20 sheet, the probability reduces to one a 64 billion.

The bottomline is, I am denied my spreadsheet view, even though I have read-only access, just because Google is paranoid that their system will choke if a large number of users start reading the same cell? This means I am cannot make a copy of the spreadsheet, cannot download it, or print it, all the features Google is so proud of.