Collaborative web-based software - Goodby Excel?
January 20, 2006
No, I don’t expect that Excel will be going away anytime soon, but this is the reason the folks in Redmond are nervous. I just came across JotSpot Tracker, a web-based excel like applicaton that brings web collaboration to the next level. Give it a look. http://tracker.jot.com/?utm_source=jot_home
I’m not that crazy about their business model which limits the free version to just to sheets and five users, but I am fairly confident that this won’t be the last attempt at an web-based spreadsheet.
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January 20, 2006 at 3:43 pm
It seems to be just a paste and copy of data from a spreadsheet with none of the calculations and data manipulation that makes Excel and similar programs so sexy.
January 21, 2006 at 8:25 am
Correct. The calculation capability is coming and should be available shortly.
February 8, 2006 at 12:39 pm
Having evaluated OpenOffice and other open source office productivity suites, I can honestly say that while word processing is fairly standard stuff, no one this far has been able to successfully reproduce all the features of Excel, and that is keeping many organizations from dumping Microsoft Office.
February 24, 2006 at 6:01 am
Interesting. I haven’t looked at OpenOffice - yet. One of these days. I know some users who are fairly well versed with Excel and push the limits and who would probably never consider an alternative, but even with them, in certain situations, I could definitely see where a web-based spreadsheet would assist them. For example a collaborative model with several stakeholders. There’s going to niche’s for lots of different tools that meet different office needs. It’s going to be hard for MS to maintain such a position of dominance with a single platform.
Here’s another one. A colleague just shared irows.com as another online spreadsheet. This one is already more robust.
March 26, 2006 at 9:07 am
The father of the spreadsheet has not been idle as well. Check out wikicalc.