Who the heck is Angus Lau anyway? In short, I am the editor of the Hong Kong Web 2.0 blog, 852signal.com.

I will be joining the EditGrid team on a short-term consulting role and will act as the Community Manager. Basically, I’ll be managing communications between EditGrid and their users through different types of medium, blogs, forums, emails, IMs, Facebook and other social mediums. I’d love to meet the users in person as well, so if you are in Hong Kong, just hit me up.

So if you have anything to say about EditGrid, good or bad, you can tell me about it. But I can honestly tell you, the upper management do spend good time of their day rummaging through the blogosphere as well, listening and replying to your feedback and comments. Even the team is active in engaging with their users too in the support forums. Either way, I’m sure your voices will be heard. If not, don’t tell us, yell at us (but refrain from using inappropriate language, keep it G-rated, please)!

By the way, I’ll be in Beijing this weekend, November 2nd to 4th. If you are an EditGrid user in Beijing, get in touch with me! Unfortunately, I’ll be situated near Tsinghua University all weekend, so find me there and let’s talk about the web and online productivity in China and of course, my new favorite topic, spreadsheets! Sorry for the short notice.

EditGrid community and behaving netizens can contact me with any questions, feedback, comments and concerns about EditGrid in the following methods:

email: angus [at] editgrid [dot] com
skype: editgrid.angus
ICQ: 17165336 (oldie, but goodie. IM of choice in the office)
MSN: anguslau_hk [at] hotmail [dot] com
AIM: aylauhk

The November 2007 issue of Fast Company magazine has an article on some new services for those who are always on the go and highlighted EditGrid as a “full-featured” spreadsheet solution in the palm of your hand.

“EditGrid (free for personal use; corporate account prices vary) is a really cool online spreadsheet program; its new iPhone version gives you full-featured spreadsheets in 4.8 ounces, not pounds.”

The Chicago Sun-Times recently published an article on online office applications. Excerpts of EditGrid is quoted below:

“Other services have taken up the goal of being the best there is at one specific thing. It’s hard to dispute EditGrid (editgrid.com) as the ultimate online spreadsheet. Its list of available functions goes on for pages, it has ample charting features, the UI is the equal of any desktop app, and it fully exploits its online personality.

Whether you simply want to make a spreadsheet available to co-workers or you want to incorporate a “live” chart or table into a Web page or blog post, EditGrid will eagerly oblige. And the iPhone edition of its service (iphone.editgrid.com) is awesome.”

We are pleased to see our online spreadsheet service mentioned with such positive praise. We’ll continue to focus on making EditGrid an even better online spreadsheet.

Earlier this month, we sent out our first survey via email, now on the web, asking our users a few simple questions about how they are using EditGrid (Use Cases), what features you would like to see (Features) and how we could make EditGrid more friendly for you (Usability). We have received over 200 responses and are continuing to receive them. However, we would like to take some time now to share some of those results:

Top 5 Use Cases:

1. Stock portfolio and investment tracking
2. Student-Student, Student-Teacher collaboration
3. Managing personal budgets
4. Event scheduling and planning
5. Inventory management

We are thrilled to see our respondents use EditGrid the way we designed it to be used, in regular and real-time collaboration. It’s gratifying to see groups from education institutions (6th graders on up), businesses, and teams separated by geographic regions take advantage of our service. The respondents also used EditGrid for tracking finances, payroll, expenditures, fantasy sports, personal diets and workouts. In addition, they use it to plan weddings, company events, track inventory and even estimate character performance in the World of Warcraft!

5 Most Requested Features:

1. Email support
2. Merge cells
3. Auto-filter
4. Conditional formatting
5. Improve graphs and charts

5 Most Requested Usability Improvements:

1. Performance
2. Help/Guides/Demos
3. Handle large amount of data
4. Behave similar to other desktop spreadsheet software
5. Localization

We were sure the features and usability requests were going to draw a huge response and it did. Everyone had their own thing they’d like to see in EditGrid and we are all ears. Along with the top 5’s listed above, there were number of responses requesting for more Microsoft Excel™ like features and for those who sought that functionality with Microsoft Excel™, you’ll be glad to know that we have recently released EditGrid Excel Plus plugin (in private beta) to get the best of both worlds.

Another concern for many was our performance in load times and response time. Although we can’t match the speeds that desktop programs give you, we strive to increase the performance in future releases of EditGrid.

We love hearing from our users directly, both positive and negative feedback, whether it’s in our blog, support forums, emails and surveys like this one. So, if you missed out on the survey, there’s no need to worry, we still want to hear your thoughts, please take a few minutes by following this link to complete our 3 question survey. Knowing more from our users and getting to know our users will help us build a better online spreadsheet.

Thanks again for those who responded and we look forward to hearing more from you!

We at the EditGrid Team believe that by keep delivering more power to our users, we are making our technology potentially disruptive.

When people think of compatibility across spreadsheet applications, people tend to think of fidelity — whether the spreadsheet file exported from one application can be imported into another application without loss of quality or detail. While EditGrid has been doing pretty well in this arena, we are not satisfied with this — exporting spreadsheet data from EditGrid into a file means that the data have become “offline”. It means that the user loses something — the ability to get real-time updated data and collaborate with each other online — that the user is entitled to on EditGrid.

With this vision in mind we are pleased to announce the launch of EditGrid Excel Plus, a plugin for Microsoft Excel™ that brings the power of EditGrid to the most popular desktop spreadsheet application, in private beta. After installing EditGrid Excel Plus onto your copy of Microsoft Excel, you’ll be able to retrieve data from an EditGrid spreadsheet into your Excel workbook — with RTU — as well as to publish data from your Excel workbook to your EditGrid spreadsheet with one click. You can sign up for the private beta programme now.

This plugin opens up infinite possibilities not available to Excel users before. Combined with EditGrid’s remote data and capability to write data into an EditGrid spreadsheet through the EditGrid API, EditGrid Excel Plus brings live data from the Internet to your desktop. EditGrid powers up Excel.

“The capability to push data from EditGrid to Excel in real-time is amazing,” said Stefan Reichenbach, head of Environmental Markets at Reuters. “We can already see a number of real-life applications in the industry. EditGrid continues to lead the way forward on how online spreadsheets can be useful in our day-to-day operations.”

The development of EditGrid Excel Plus is sponsored by Reuters and ICAP and we are grateful for their sponsorship.

Next up: Excel-to-Excel RTU.

Excel is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.