What a difference!
A lot was written recently about Google Spreadsheet . I had been avoiding writing about it , mostly because so much was written about it that I didn’t see any good reason to join the crowd.
I only writing about Google Spreadsheet as a comparison to WikiCalc – and the comparison isn’t compliments Google Spreadsheet. Google’s product is very basic, but this isn’t his real problem. The problem is that it except Microsoft office paradigm without any attempt to change the concept. Nick Carr called it ad-on to MS Office, and he has a good point.
WikiCalc, however, taking the spreadsheet to different places. It is a very interesting attempt to not only take the spreadsheet out of the local machine but to implement some of the advantages of the web.
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Rogel @ June 10, 2006
Hi! Have you seen EditGrid also?
There’s a comparison between EditGrid and google spreadsheet here:
http://www.editgrid.com/tnc/pkchan/EditGrid_v._Google.
You may wish to take a look!
Thanks Tony, I didn’t know about EditGrid before. It seems, from a short review, an interesting application. Would you mind to explain in what way it is going to change the way we are using spreadsheets?
Thanks for your appreciation!
Many people compare this kind of online spreadsheets with their desktop ancestors. But in fact, what we’re going to do is not an “Excel replacement”.
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 http://www.editgrid.com/tnc/cliff/Real-time_Portfolio_Valuation,
and publish your result back online. This allows everyone to have the rights to intrepret and publish data.
We’re still at the very beginning of realising the data platform concept. But we’re moving fast on this track. Hope we can deliver many more examples and usages in this area in the very near future.
Tony,
Thanks for the detailed answer. I Think it, and EditGrid, “deserve” a post of their own in my humble blog - and I’ll try to write it today.
[...] 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 http://www.editgrid.com/tnc/cliff/Real-time_Portfolio_Valuation, 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. EditGrid, Web 2.0, Web spreadsheet, WikiCalc [...]