EditGrid stores tables. When data are as structured as tables, searching can yield more than a simple textual search.

I manage my contact lists in EditGrid, some personal, some shared with others. Retrieving the mobile number of, say, William among my business contacts involves the steps of i./ opening the spreadsheet “Business Contacts” in EditGrid, ii./ locating William’s record using “find in spreadsheet” and skipping the wrong Williams, and iii./ scanning through the column headers to fetch the right cell. Is this difficult? Not really. But we believe we can do things better.

Now we have EditGrid Finder. All I need to do is to key in william mobile and, sure enough, the search results page shows a snippet of the Business Contacts spreadsheet which shows the relevant rows, columns and their intersection. I get precisely what I need to know without opening the spreadsheet. And if I want to know more (eg the office number), I can still click on the spreadsheet’s permalink as displayed on the search results page.

What’s more, EditGrid Finder is not limited to stuffs under your workspace. EditGrid Finder allows you to search just your workspace or over all public spreadsheets. Let me show you some examples:

• Remember we’ve some demonstrated EditGrid with real-time data from Yahoo! Finance? Searching for “GOOG Price” gives you the most updated stock quote we’ve retrieved from the sources as stated on http://www.editgrid.com/tnc/finance/ .

• EditGrid Localisation Project contains a set of translation spreadsheets. Searching “insert column spanish” returns you the Spanish translation of the phrase “insert column”.

To start, you can upload your frequently searched data and see if EditGrid Finder can save your time immediately. Soon you will discover that while EditGrid lets you edit data collaboratively with your colleagues and friends, be they price comparisons, bug database or everything you can imagine, EditGrid Finder gives you a tool to search efficiently over them.

EditGrid Finder is just our first step towards making useful data more available. It will become better and better when

• you share your knowledge by contributing more public spreadsheets, and
• you let us know how we can do better at the EditGrid Forum

This entry was posted on Monday, October 2nd, 2006 at 8:39 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.