Google has acquired a startup that will enable it to launch Google Spreadsheets.

The company has confirmed that it has acquired a small company called 2Web Technologies, provider of the XL2Web spreadsheet web publishing service, to create Google Spreadsheets, a preview of which is now available for limited testing.

The acquisition follows that of Upstartle, an online word processing software service provider in March, and increases the likelihood that Google is preparing a suite of online applications as an alternative to Microsoft’s Office suite.

Upstartle’s Writely.com service was immediately closed to new registrations, but is expected to commence testing in July.

Google’s product manager for the Spreadsheets project, Jonathan Rochelle, was formerly chief executive of 2Web. He told the Associated Press that the project was focused on enabling users to publish and share spreadsheet files, rather than competing with Microsoft’s Excel.

The limited data that available from Google at press time appeared to back that up, with Google promising the ability to create basic spreadsheets, upload .xls or .csv files, as well as store, edit and share the results with others.

As with the Upstartle acquisition and Google’s various other online application offerings – such as its Desktop, Toolbar, Mail, Calendar, Page Creator, Talk, Picasa, and Blogger software – the potential comes from how the individual components interact via the asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) programming model to form a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

While the functionality currently on offer does not suggest that Google’s offerings would meet corporate privacy concerns for enterprise data, there may be openings at the consumer and fixed function level, and the speculation really gets interesting when you take into account rumors of a Google PC dedicated appliance, in which the browser replaces the operating system as the user interface.

Whether this is what Google has in mind is purely speculation at this stage, but the potential is enough to have Microsoft worried it seems. Earlier in June the company’s chief executive Steve Ballmer told investors the software-as-a-service model – as embodied by Google – was Microsoft’s biggest challenge.