July 2007 Release (rev 9188)

Congratulations to the developers for fixing a total of 120 bugs throughout the EditGrid Big Bugs Hunt for this release. However, this release is much more than bug fixing!

The most notable new features in this release are:

• Dynamic Images, you can now play mash-up with the image URLs. See the demo spreadsheets Weatherholic and Stockaholic to see how it works. - feature sponsored by .
• Direct support of IME input of multibyte characters on IE/FF, without needing to press F2 first (#5313) - feature sponsored by .
• Official Safari 3 support - Safari is the fastest browser for running EditGrid! (note: EditGrid on iPhone not far away!)

Enhancements:

• New preference to set the default workspace filtering between “all”, “active” and “last filtering”
• New preference for organisation user to enable/disable SSL permanently
• Support formula building through keyboard’s arrow keys (#4595)
• Allow copy, cut, paste directly from system clipboard with CTRL+C/CTRL+X/CTRL+V in IE/FF/Opera
• Menu item to auto fill cells (Main menu > Edit > Autofill) (#6986)
• Highlight affected cell upon undo/redo (#6025)
• Added context menu item to spreadsheet images to trigger a force reload (#6796)
• Added “Get Cell Permalink” to cell’s context menu (#6852)
• Detect client locale automatically on the first visit (#5959)
• Allow login using the orgname/username format in organisation login page (#6760)
• Allow unmarking/deleting multiple revisions at history
• New “rename spreadsheet” link on sheet property summary page (#4313)
• Improved chat performance for spreadsheet with a lot of chat users (#6179)
• Added “select all” button on spreadsheet sharing page (#6773)
• Added captcha to prevent spamming on spreadsheet properties and email spamming (#6790, #6792)

And some major bug fixes:

• Fixed scrolling problem on chat box user list
• Allow paste from system clipboard directly under edit mode (#4900)
• Fixed workspace sort order preference malfunctioning for “sort by owner” (#6786)
• Switch to default workspace if the current workspace is unavailable (#6841)
• Fixed organisation master failed to unlock locked cells in admin mode (#6453)
• Fixed security warning when bringing up context menu by right-clicking on IE7 (#6156)
• Fixed language preference not applied with auto-login (through “remember me”) (#6840)
• Fixed invalid sheet object ordering after a spreadsheet is reopened (#6811)
• Prevent access to an inactivated user’s spreadsheet and public spreadsheet list (#6812)
• Fixed “Newly shared” workspace message nuisance (#6775)
• More meaningful error message for oooc failure (#6246, #6247)
• Fixed wrong revision marked “rolled back” upon roll back (#5939)
• Fixed initial version not included in revision history (#5277)
• Password should not be stored in password field after login failed (#6917)
• Show a dummy “failed to load” image if sheet image can’t be imported (#6928)

We’re busy expanding: headcounts, office space, etc. But delivering a better EditGrid remains the top priority around here. Ladies and gentlemen: July 2007 release is out!

The July release was primarily a bug hunt campaign. Our team devoted much effort to fine tuning and polishing our system in order to give you the best possible experience using EditGrid. More than 100 bugs are fixed. On top of that, we’d like to spotlight a new feature we think you’ll like: Dynamic Images.

From now on, you can use cell formulas and references to generate the URLs of your images. When you change the values of the referenced cells, the URL and hence the image will be updated dynamically, and this makes parameterizing an image possible.

Let’s take a look at some interesting examples.

Stockaholic

If you recall Alexaholic (now Statsaholic) you’ll know how mashing-up images can work like a charm. Alexaholic mashed-up charts from Alexa to create an integrated report comparing popularity ranking of the submitted sites. It essentially functioned as a very nice mash-up tool for comparing different web sites with one another.

This same idea has inspired the examples of EditGrid’s dynamic images in action below.

Check out the Stockaholic spreadsheet. Does it look familiar? Well, yes. Now type in one to five stocks symbols (say, MSFT and GOOG) in the space provided. Immediately you will see the stock chart get updated, and it shows you how GOOG outperformed MSFT in the past few months.

Stockaholic - formulate the actual URL from the input parameters and load the chart

How does it work? We simply concatenate a bunch of input parameters to construct a URL that creates our stock chart over at YAHOO! Finance. The stock chart will be reloaded whenever our input is updated, hence the name “Dynamic Images”.

Weatherholic

How about a more complex example? Check out the Weatherholic spreadsheet as well. This is another demo of how mash-ups can make creative use of online resources. Type in a city name (the demo currently offers only a few choices of cities), the sheet will then generate a report of the current and forecast weather of the respective city, including a satellite image, a pressure diagram plus a rainfall/temperature map of the nearby area fetched from BBC Weather and t7online.com. Pretty cool, isn’t it?

Weatherholic - use Remote Data and Dynamic Image to load weather charts

Again, this example makes use of dynamic images, which their URLs are built from user input. The Weatherholic spreadsheet also uses Remote Data - the RSS of the weather of the cities is loaded regularly from YAHOO! NEWS Weather and the URL of the weather icon is then fed to a dynamic image to be displayed in the report.

Now it’s your turn.

We’ve worked to make EditGrid more than just a spreadsheet, and we’d like to see what creative uses you can do with it. It’s up to you and your imagination to combine these functionalities into practical yet extraordinary ideas, and be sure to publish your spreadsheet when your great work is done!

Although great standards like (X)HTML and CSS defined by W3C already work smoothly on the Web, we still find them a little bit insufficient for presenting effectively graphical and tabular data, which is common with such as statistical and analytical information.

Tables are natively supported by HTML, but they are far from being convenient for non-technical people to use; charts are not easy either — most probably you’ll have to extract a chart from your desktop spreadsheet application, save it as an image file and upload it to somewhere before you can really display it on your web page. Worst of all, the tables and charts are static.

We therefore make EditGrid best for publishing live tables and charts. Charts for stock analysis can now be generated dynamically from real time data, and you get 30+ different kinds of useful charts to choose. Neat and tidy statistical tables can be embedded in your online experiment report, or you can update scores in your online tournament tables directly from your EditGrid spreadsheet. All you need to do is just getting a permalink for a chart, and copying and pasting a piece of readily available code for a table.

What if you’ve already drawn up a nice illustration and would like to post it on EditGrid? We also support inserting custom (static) images into EditGrid spreadsheets. Simply paste your link and everything is done! (Question: What if you’d like to insert a dynamic image that depends on parameters and, better still, these parameters are on your EditGrid spreadsheets? Watch this space :P)

Chart Gallery 1

Chart Gallery 2
We believe sooner or later you will find more tables and charts on the Internet. They are live, and generated by EditGrid.

What would EditGrid mean to you other than a spreadsheet application? Our smart users have demonstrated some of the great uses in the financial world.

This spreadsheet makes good use of the power of remote data. It fetches stock quotes of the Hong Kong Hang Seng Index companies and incorporates them in conjunction with the latest prices of the corresponding ADRs. In this way it compares the stocks’ performance in the two markets and, owing to the 13-hour time difference between New York and Hongkong, predicts the resulting impact to the Hang Seng Index on the next day.

Additionally, its second sheet comprises a comparison between prices of H-shares listed in Hong Kong and the corresponding prices of A-shares in Shanghai. You may probably discover that the prices in Hong Kong are to some extent influenced by the A-shares.

The spreadsheet has become one of the most popular spreadsheet on editgrid.com. Many visitors keep their eyes on the ADRs every night (in Hong Kong time) and the A-shares every morning. It really showcases EditGrid’s capabilities to manage and structure financial data (and most importantly the data is live!) in order to create useful presentations of instant market trends, analysis and even charts .

Hong Kong ADR prices to affect HSI and H-shares vs A-shares


Live currencies exchange table

Our team has also made a number of spreadsheets that contain the quotes of the component stocks of the world major indexes, including DJI and GSPC of US, HSI and HSCEI of Hongkong, and a live currencies exchange table, etc.

Similar usage can be found in this spreadsheet, where world major indexes quotes are centralized to produce a nice watch-list for busy investors.

Have you thought of any other clever usage of EditGrid to manage your portfolio?