I’d like to share some of what goes on at EditGrid, as I’m sure some of our readers are interested to know. Last Friday, the team took a day off to celebrate the latest release. With the tons of things you can do in Hong Kong, shopping, hiking, bicycling, fishing, and did I already mention shopping, we chose the great outdoors by hiking the (paved) trails of Tung Chung in Lantau Island. You can’t tell, but we are actually an outdoorsy bunch.

We spent the entire afternoon breathing in the cool crisp air, which usually doesn’t exist in the heart of Hong Kong and it was the perfect escape from the hustle and bustle of the city. Not only did we hike but we found ourselves mixing in with the many tourists there and joined in on the sightseeing as well. We took the 20-minute ride on the Ngong Ping cable car to reach Ngong Ping. Ngong Ping is a tourist attraction with a small shopping center (surprise!), but beyond the restaurants and sovenier shops, you reach sights worth seeing, like the Tian Tan Buddha, Po Lin Monestary and Wisdom Path.

Before the hike down the mountains, we grabbed some grub fit for monks (vegetarian meal) at the Po Lin Monastery. Then we warmed up our hike with a steep 268-step climb to get up close and personal with what was once the world’s tallest bronze Buddha at 34 meters tall, then a stroll down the Wisdom Path so we could all be a little wiser. After running around like tourists, we began our 2.5 hour hike back to our starting point at a shopping mall in Tung Chung.

The hike itself was very much relaxed and together with a bunch of photo enthusiasts snapping left and right (some photos here), the pace was perfect but slower than expected. This resulted in a breakaway group that sped down the mountain in record time and we later rendezvous with them at a coffee shop where they were enjoying their cup of joe (they gotta have their coffee).

All in all, we had a great time being tourists and enjoyed each other’s company while taking in everything mother nature has to offer in Hong Kong. (If you ever find yourselves in Hong Kong, this makes for a good half day itinerary)

We have made some improvements in this month’s release that will definitely be helpful to our users. You can read about what other features, enhancements and bug fixes were released in our changelog.

The most visible change is the dashboard view upon logging into EditGrid. The dashboard allows you to do more than accessing your spreadsheets. It adds a level of social interaction to your spreadsheet experience and encourages users to explore and share their work with others. Yet, users can still quickly access their most recent spreadsheets and their workspace.

Explore a new dimension of EditGrid with these new features found in the new dashboard:

• User profiles - Create your own profile and get to know other EditGrid users and view their public spreadsheets.
• Spreadsheet tags - tags allows visitors to find your public spreadsheets easily by user specified keywords.
• Search - search all publicly available spreadsheets in EditGrid.
• Popular spreadsheets - See which spreadsheets are popular with users and which are picked and featured by EditGrid team.



We’ve got few more features to introduce this month. Features that most spreadsheet users can’t live without.

Auto Filter
Yes, this is the auto filter you guys have longed for. Our auto filter is more complete than the competitors and functions the same way a desktop spreadsheet does.





Show/Hide Sheets
We have added another feature that allows users control how the spreadsheet is viewed by other users. Similar to the feature found in the desktop spreadsheet, you now have the option to hide worksheets and display the important data in the spreadsheet.



Macro library
The macro library contains macros created by the EditGrid team and our users. Users can now easily add macros from the library to their spreadsheets. It’s an open platform where users can publish their own macros and share with other EditGrid users.

We released our October 2008 release late last week with only enhancements and bug fixes. We have implemented a unique email address system whereby new and old users will be require to have a single email address for each account they have. Prior to this release, users were allowed to create multiple EditGrid accounts with the same email address. Now, new users who are creating multiple accounts will need to register each one with a different email address.

How will this affect existing users? Those with multiple accounts should have already received an email notifying them of this change. It’s recommended that you update your email addresses for each of the accounts you have, but it’s not required. If you choose not to update/add a new e-mail address, our system will not be able to recover your password in the event you forgot your password.

In both cases, if you haven’t already verified your email address, you will notice the red Verfiy Email link in the top left corner which will remind you that you haven’t verified your email address with us.

Addtionally, we have added a new option in our internal hyperlink toolbox (Insert > Hyperlink) to enable users to easily create links to other worksheets in your workbook, as noted below in the screenshot of the hyperlink toolbox.

As always, go to our change log and have a look at what we added and fixed.

One of the great EditGrid features is the ability to share spreadsheets with your collaborators, however, we’ve recently received questions about spreadsheet sharing. It’s safe to say users are comfortable sharing their public spreadsheets, but most are concerned and maybe unclear when sharing their private spreadsheets. I’d like to share some information that will help, especially for the new users.

By default, our spreadsheet permissions are set to Private and we have options that will allow you to share your private spreadsheets. It’s important to note that sharing a private spreadsheet does not mean you have to change its permission to Public Read and/or Write permission. You can continue to share your private spreadsheets with the existing sharing features:

• Share to Email
• Share to User
• Share to Workspace

For those who want to publish their private spreadsheet to their website or blog, it’s important to note that your spreadsheet requires public access, such as Public Read and/or Write. Therefore, sharing your private spreadsheet with our blog widget feature is unavailable. If there is information you only want to share with certain individuals through the blog widget, you may choose to set the permission to Protected Read/Write and then publish it to your website or blog. Your collaborators or visitors will then require a password from you before they can view it.

Lastly, much like your accounts for other online services, you should never share your account with anyone else.

For those who have questions with the instructions on sharing in our help center, we’d like to get some feedback from you guys, whether it was helpful and most importantly, easy to follow and understand. Let us know by leaving us a comment or send them to cs@editgrid.com.

If all your answers are yes (like me). Why don’t you send me a little something telling me your EditGrid experience?

EditGrid’s User Story and Customer Success pages are places to share and inspire the others with your own user experiences; another bonus is, that you get your name/ company name posted on our site - a tiny page exposure credit on the web!

We have received loads of great comments about EditGrid since we launched out of Beta back in 2007 March. I would be thrilled to get more of your submissions about your user story/ customer success.

Gather up your EditGrid power and submit now!

I wish all a Happy Halloween!

Microsoft is here, finally.

I would love to get my hands on their live application but seems all I have now is a screenshot. Well, a picture is worth a thousand words, so let’s see what we can learn from it:

These looks good:

• In-cell graphing and visualisation, as shown in “Rent” and “Nat. Light” column.
• In-cell sorting button, as shown in cell A7.
• Auto-filter! Although the screenshot doesn’t show it is using it.
• Pretty nice charts.

These looks weird:

• Selected cell content is not displayed in the formula bar.
• The cursor doesn’t have drag-and-fill feature.
• Where’s the vertical scroll bar?
• No indication of sharing, collaboration and publishing features which we think are important to online spreadsheets.

Afterall, it’s just a screenshot. The live product may be very different when it is released.

Competition is good. This is just exciting.

It’s been an eventful month for us at EditGrid. We’ve rolled out a key spreadsheet feature this month, the Show/Hide rows and columns. We understand this is useful feature is on every users’ wishlist and now it’s finally here.

Show/Hide Rows and Columns - Right click on any column or row header and choose Hide or Unhide.

There are other enhancements on EditGrid:

Paste Special - Choose from various paste and operation options.

Advanced Color Picker for Background and Text - Specify your own colors for your fonts and backgrounds with a color picker that allows you to input hex values.

Show/Hide Grid Lines
For those who are seeking a bit more performance (when using Firefox) you may hide the grid lines for faster scrolling.

To see the complete list of enhancements and bug fixes for the September 2008 release, please have a look at our Change Log.

Best Young Entrepreneur 2008 Nominations
As you may have already noticed on our main site, we received news from Business Week Asia that our founding team of David Lee, P.K. Chan, Alan Tam, Reggie Chan and Tony Sung were nominated as Asia’s Best Young Entrepreneurs in 2008. Go over to Business Week and see a list of other nominees and don’t forget to cast your vote.

Data availability from Hong Kong Exchange
For those who are already trading in the Hong Kong market or others interested in trading internationally, we are excited to announce the data availability from the Hong Kong Exchange and Clearing Limited (HKEx). With our existing Reuters remote data function, you will be able to access both the historical data with REUTERS_HISTORICAL() and company fundamentals with REUTERS_FUNDAMENTALS() from stocks and companies listed in the Hong Kong Exchange.

If you are unfamiliar with the Hong Kong Exchange, you may find more information on their website and their news site.

Recently, I’ve seen a number of users telling us they are experiencing problems when loading their workspace or spreadsheets. Instead of seeing their workspace, they’ll see a blank webpage and the message Initializing Workspace sit idle (figure below).

Some other users are able to see their workspace but when they open a spreadsheet, the spreadsheet will not load and returns a white blank page.

The problem is with accessing the content delivery network, CDN. If you are experiencing the problem, we have a tweak that will rectify the problem. We suggest you do the following:

1. Go to http://www.editgrid.com/tweak
2. Click on Disable CDN for your browser link (see figure below)
3. Reload your workspace or spreadsheet

This usually does the trick. In some cases, users may be required to clear their cache before seeing their workspace and spreadsheets.