Confused about Google App Engine and Google Docs options

I want to use the Google App Engine to store my data and then query/display/ edit it using Google Spreadsheets as the user interface, with multiple concurrent users having their own view of the data. The problem I have now is that if I put everyone's data on the same Google Spreadsheet that everyone accesses, we can't each do sorting开发者_如何学C / filtering at the same time.

Is there a way to do this, and is it a good idea to build a simple system this way? I'll eventually need to query a series of Google Word Processor documents as well.

Can someone point me in the right direction on this or suggest other options?

---

I would ask what the advantage of doing something like this is as opposed to say hosting your application on Google App Engine and building a javascript front end with grids to help sort/filter and view data.

Anyway to answer your questions, you can build your interface over Google Spreadsheets using Google App Scripts. This will allow you to do things like authenticate your user, query, update and display data. If you want to merely display data it turns out that Google Spreadsheets has some built-in functions to do that.

Regarding consistency you should read up on GAE's Datastore as well as its features like transactions. The datastore is not an RDBMS, but is an object database which stores objects against keys. Again something to consider if you are planning to do a lot of data analysis and computation (summations, aggregations).

Overall I would recommend doing a rough design of your system without fixing on particular technologies (like GAE, and Google Spreadsheets). Once you identify what your key goals are for your application, then you can figure out which technologies and resources would make the most sense within your budget.