Short comments on Web Spreadsheets
The expectation from web spreadsheet is to be more than a replica of Microsoft’s Excel. In a conversation that developed in earlier post Tony from EditGrid offered his view on the future of web spreadsheets:
An online spreadsheet service is very different from a download application in two areas: 1) availability and 2) the potential as a web data platform.
Availability is simple to understand, it just happens when you can access back your data anywhere with any connected computer, even those in the public library.
But web data platform a concept yet to be fully developed. It basically promotes the following activities: data harvesting, transformation and publishing. An example is to crawl life stock prices from a website (see http://www.editgrid.com/tnc/finance), and transform the prices into performance indexes according to your own portfolio (see here) ,
and publish your result back online. This allows everyone to have the rights to intrepret and publish data.
We are only in the beginning of a long journey to develop meaningful web spreadsheet. Applications like EditGrid and WikiCalc are very interesting attempts to develop the additional added value of the web – collaboration, syndication etc into more powerful spreadsheet. I’ll will follow their development with great interest.
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