It has been some time since I talked about EditGrid, which is one my favorite Web2.0 apps. Keeping up its aggressive pace of development, EditGrid went through another of its release cycle that deserves a new writeup.
Today EditGrid added Live Chat feature that allows users viewing a particular spreadsheet to collaborate online simultaneously. EditGrid shows the number of users viewing a spreadsheet, and if you click on the user count icon you can start chatting instantaneously. So no more flipping back and forth between Google Talk client and your spreadsheet. If you close the chat window, and bring it up some time later in the same spreadsheet editing session, EditGrid restores your previous communication.
From the very start EditGrid has supported versioning of spreadsheets using which you can switch to previous version of your spreadsheet anytime. But if you wanted to view changes made to a particular field you had to locate and load the exact version to view modifications. With the new release EditGrid has enabled users to view history of changes made in a cell record from the right click context menu itself that makes out life much easier.
In the previous release of EditGrid, they had introduced a searching by keyword across all your spreadsheets and public spreadsheet available at EditGrid. This feature especially noteworthy ’cause you don’t need to open the spreadsheet to view the searched content. In the search results, EditGrid gives you a snapshot of the places where the keyword occurs in all the spreadsheets.
EditGrid had also enabled charting which enabled easy export and import of charts. Since charts generated through EditGrid have a permalink, you can easily link them your blog or web site.
Other notable features released in recent releases include official support for Opera 9, event driven real-time update of spreadsheet, ability to apply cell border and freeze pane, export to PDF, overflow of text to adjacent cells, and ability to open any spreadsheet located on a web site or on your desktop using online Excel viewer.
EditGrid has introduced number of features in last few releases that makes it easily the best web-based spreadsheet available. I think all that EditGrid now needs is the power of Google’s datacenters or few Sun Blackboxes scattered around the world.
Related:
EditGrid Releases new API
Links:
EditGrid
November 4, 2006 at 10:31 am |
[...] Xcellery is another Web20 tool that makes collaboration around Microsoft Office documents easier. Currently supporting Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, users can create, edit and share their .xls files either using Xcellery online editor or using Microsoft Excel. Xcellery does offer features similar to EditGrid and Google Spreadsheets(GS), but does not want to be just another online spreadsheet editor. Xcellery team is trying to bridge the gap between the online and desktop world in similar way as InstaColl with web-based features. This does seem to be the right strategy for now ’cause of the bandwidth and browser related issues faced by EditGrid and GS users. [...]
November 9, 2006 at 4:25 pm |
[...] I think Google-Docs, and EditGrid should take some cue from Zimbra and start working on offline clients for their word and spreadsheet processing tools. Having a similar setup as Wikicalc and being able to install and run these tools on the localhost and later sync back to the server will be one of the best features they can add. [...]
November 15, 2006 at 3:46 am |
[...] This year has been really low for the collaboration technologies. After hectic activity late last year and until start of this year, where we saw number of startups providing Office20 tools, things seemed to have cooled down now. Notable startups in the timespan include Writely, Trumba, EditGrid, iRows, Numsum, Thumstacks, Preezo, CentralDesktop, Zimbra, Jotspot, and Kiko. Writely, Jotspot, and now iRows have been gobbled up by Google. Kiko went the ebay way. Trumba now caters to enterprise users. Thumbstacks and Numsum have pretty much silent for past few months. So all we are left with is Zimbra, EditGrid, Preezo, and CentralDesktop. Was this our Office20? [...]
December 13, 2006 at 3:28 am |
[...] EditGrid had already made available its bookmarklet and spreadsheet viewer that makes it easy to open spreadsheets located on web. [...]
February 14, 2007 at 8:12 am |
[...] EditGrid today also released genuine numbers of the user-base growth. They currently have 19500+ total registered users out of which 15K are personal and 4.5K users come from 200 companies using EditGrid at their workplace. I think the latter number clearly tells that companies are looking to go beyond the standard Microsoft offerings to cut down costs and make data accessible to their users anywhere anytime. And not to forget the ability for multiple people to edit and collaborate on the same sheet at the same time. [...]
June 10, 2007 at 8:49 pm |
[...] EditGrid Spreadsheets now has Live Chat [...]
December 19, 2007 at 8:40 pm |
Oh, and did not know about it. Thanks for the information …