It’s been a while since we’ve updated you on what’s been keeping us busy here at EditGrid. Today we’re excited to announce a new core feature for the EditGrid platform: Data Functions. But first a little background…

The Competitive World of Spreadsheets

EditGrid has some tough competition. In fact, we often hear from friends how impressed they are with EditGrid’s product usually followed by a comment about how incredibly difficult it must be to compete with Microsoft and Google in this market segment. We’re well aware of the challenges we face. Between Microsoft’s dominant desktop productivity suite, Google’s brand and web presence to help it grow its web-based suite, and the incredible pool of resources at both companies, to say that EditGrid is an underdog would definitely be an understatement! Nonetheless, the strength of our competition has forced us to stay focused and relentlessly work on improving our product and user experience. As part of our drive to compete in this market we’ve decided to focus on data as a way to help differentiate us from our competitors and help our users create more and better spreadsheet content.

Data and Spreadsheets On Demand

EditGrid has come a long way in the last year and half. Today we offer a critical mass of spreadsheet features such as functions, formatting, and shortcut keys (sorry, no pivot tables just yet!), which make EditGrid as usable as your desktop spreadsheet. In addition, we’ve added a critical mass of web features such as sharing, collaboration, and publishing, which allow EditGrid to serve new use cases for spreadsheets on the web. Today we are taking our first step towards delivering a critical mass of data as well.

To get things started, we’ve made available stock and news data from Reuters, and partnered with StrikeIron and Xignite to expose some of their API data and services in EditGrid. In total we’re launching with 41 functions in 7 categories - all of which you can use to pull live data directly into your spreadsheet for further analysis or presentation. See the complete list at the bottom.

By delivering both data and spreadsheets on demand, we can significantly enhance the value of our standalone spreadsheet component. Easy access to live and automatic data will help our users create compelling spreadsheet content that will motivate increased sharing and collaboration in EditGrid. With today’s release it’s now possible for our users to create advanced valuation models and summary sheets for stocks, or to analyze trends in web startup funding and traffic, to name just a few of the possibilities. Of course, we’ll continue to add more and more data to EditGrid and are confident that in both the near and long term there will be exciting developments on this front. Be sure to drop by our forum to tell us what data you want as well as to share your work with others.

Here are a few examples:

Live data from Alexa, Compete and Yahoo! Finance is used to calculate a startup valuation.

Analyst estimates and recommendations come together in this spreadsheet to help you compare a stock with a few of its competitors.

Enjoy!

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at 2:33 pm and is filed under EditGrid, Ideas, News, Talks. 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.