One of the great things about EditGrid is that it allows users to collaborate online simultaneously. Many times we hear from our users how great it is to be able to share important information with colleagues from afar without having to email spreadsheets back and forth. But collaboration is not just about structured data — you may often have to discuss with your colleague how to organise your data; which data source is more reliable and up-to-date; which entries require attention; and so on. We’ve seen chatting on spreadsheet but that’s in general undesirable and not easy to manage.

So we bring to you live chat on EditGrid. In the status bar below the grid you will now find a dialogue icon, as well as how many users are “online” on the same spreadsheet. If you find your colleague or friend popping by, just bring on the chat box by clicking the dialogue icon to begin live chat. No more constant switching between the browser and your favourite IM client — just stay at the spreadsheet and edit as you will while texting with your colleagues and friends at the same time! Better still, you can toggle the chat box easily using the Ctrl+M hotkey.

(If you find the message “Chat session not started” next to the dialogue icon, don’t worry — we are enabling chatting on a browser-by-browser basis, and chatting in your browser will be supported soon.)Live chat is just one of the new feature available in Public Beta 15. Also available since Public Beta 15 are:

• Official Opera 9.0 support. We notice that when Opera is superior in terms of both performance and functionalities in certain areas against other browsers when loading EditGrid, and we’ve been paying special attention to make EditGrid good in Opera 9.0 since its official release in September. We are now satisfied that EditGrid boasts one of the best support to Opera 9.0 among the Web 2.0 applications.
• Cell properties. We go one step further than spreadsheet revision history and allow you to view a cell’s last update record. Simply click “Cell properties” at the context menu.
  
• Workspace sort order. After numerous user requests we’ve made it default to sort by last modification time — and you can change the default sorting order in your preferences as well.
  
• And more.

That’s it for now; let us know what do you think about the new features at the EditGrid Forum. And many more exciting things are to come at the forthcoming releases. Bring it on!

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 2nd, 2006 at 11:18 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.