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!

Over the weekend, we spotted some unusual activities in our email system. A user had abused our system by using our Invite Friends function and sent out invitation emails which included a private message that solicit personal and/or financial information to his/her list of recipients. It’s unknown how many were affected, but would like to inform all of the situation.

If you have received an email from an unknown sender and by way of the EditGrid domain over this past weekend requesting personal information, bear in mind that it might be spam or a possible phishing attempt. Please note that EditGrid will never ask for passwords nor will we ask for financial-related information in emails.

In response, we have banned the user, set a limit on the number of invitations you are allowed to send and we are also seeking additional ways to improve so this and similar activities will not happen again.

We want to remind everyone that EditGrid will not tolerate this type of activities. We take user privacy seriously and our Privacy Policy outlines EditGrid’s commitment to protecting our users’ privacy. Those registered users who fail to abide by the Terms of Use will be dealt with according to the Terms.

The Sichuan earthquake which struck last Monday has brought more than 32,000 dead and 220,000 injured, in addition to making many more homeless.  The whole EditGrid Team has been very concerned of the earthquake’s impact and has been tracking the earthquake closely.

As a tiny token of our empathy to those affected by the natural disaster, we have pledged a HK$30,000 donation to the relief effort.  We know we are not in as good a financial position as the other Chinese Internet giants’ to make substantial donation — what’s important is that we think we’ve done our part.  And we encourage all our users and readers to consider donating to the relief aid fund as well (see this spreadsheet for more details), if you haven’t already done so.

Today marks one week since the earthquake struck and also sees the start of a 3-day national mourning period.  During these three days we’ll re-paint the EditGrid site banner black as a sign of mourning.  Spend a little thought over to the earthquake victims whenever you notice the mourning black banner — they’ll need and appreciate every bit of your concerns.

Update: our user war-god, publisher of the most popular spreadsheet on EditGrid, played his part as well:

(Contrast the above with the spreadsheet’s normal form as reported here.)

The 7.8 magnitude earthquake that struck Sichuan, China earlier in the week was so powerful that the impact was even felt here in Hong Kong, some 1500km away. While Hong Kong was not affected, the same cannot be said for those in Sichuan and surrounding provinces, where tens of thousands of familes have been impacted by this disaster. The estimated death toll has reached close to 20,000 with many still unaccounted for, not to mention the millions of homes that were destroyed.

We have created a spreadsheet with information pertaining to the earthquake, donation status and ways you can help out. Everyone is welcome to help update it with the latest information, stats and donation efforts.

Along with the many companies, individuals and governments who have made contributions, EditGrid’s parent company Team and Concepts is also doing their part by making a donation to World Vision Hong Kong to help the quake victims, our neighbors up north.

For those who want to contribute, you can do it through World Vision Hong Kong, or through other organizations. We have created a list of organizations from Hong Kong, China and US who are accepting donations to aid the relief efforts.

April Fools’ Day, if recent events are any indication to future trends, is as good a day as any to launch a good product. And so today we are very excited to present a much awaited piece of news which has kept many of our customers and supporters waiting since the launch of EditGrid Confluence Plugin for Confluence Hosted: EditGrid Confluence Plugin is now available for licensing customers.

In the enterprise software sector, Atlassian’s Confluence has been the leading enterprise wiki of choice for over 4,600 organisations from 75 countries. To many of these Confluence users, an easy-to-install and -maintain wiki software with enterprise-class security hosted in-house is a major reason for participating in the wiki revolution and enjoying all the benefits of having an in-house platform for text and document collaboration, where it has never been so easy for teams to collaborate and share knowledge.

And now, with EditGrid Confluence Plugin, Confluence users will be able to add data, tables, formulae and charts to the equation. No more head-scratching wiki markups to add a table to a page — a spreadsheet is, for many people, the natural interface to design and present tabular data. Spreadsheets are stored securely as attachments to pages, with access control, revision history and indexing all managed by Confluence natively. And best of all, with RTU Confluence users can collaborate with each other in real-time — every edit is synchronised. Just like EditGrid.

EditGrid Confluence Plugin, while leveraging the Confluence plugin framework, is different with other plugin in one key aspect — it requires the EditGrid Server to function properly, and the EditGrid Server, unlike the plugin itself, requires Ubuntu Linux 6.06 (Server Edition), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 or CentOS 5.1. As such, we offer two flexible deployment modes to customers:

• Standalone Version: the plugin is shipped with EditGrid Server Confluence Edition for a completely in-house installation.
• Hosted Version: the plugin is installed in-house with Confluence and connects to the EditGrid Server hosted on our infrastructure at editgrid.com. Spreadsheets are still stored locally but would be uploaded to editgrid.com in a secure manner and hosted there temporarily while being edited or viewed.

With a competitive pricing scheme, the plugin will become a mission-critical value-adding component to every Confluence installation. As FSJ would have said: I honor (sic) the place where unstructured text collaboration (wiki) and structured, logical data sharing (spreadsheet) become one.

Why wait any longer? Buy now, or better still, download a free-trial copy of EditGrid Confluence Plugin and install in on your licensed copy of Confluence today (you’ll need a 30-day evaluation key from us; get it here free-of-charge). See also the Confluence Plugin FAQ to learn more.

We were pretty busy getting some fun features into this month’s release. So let’s dive right into the goodness, the list of new features:

• Spreadsheet Analytics
• Mashup Functions
• ExcelPlus Plugin
• Template Library

Ever wonder how popular your spreadsheet is? With Spreadsheet Analytics, now you can track the visiting trend of your spreadsheet and see find out how people arrive at your spreadsheet during the last 30 days. Click the new “Analytics” tab under spreadsheet properties to find out more. Have a peek at a live example.

We’ve created five new mashup functions:

• Google Charts googlechart()
• Yahoo! Finance yfinancechart()
• Reuters reuterschart()
• Alexa alexachart()
• Compete competechart()

With those functions, you can grab financial charts or web traffic charts and put them directly into a cell of your spreadsheet.

Our ExcelPlus plugin has left private beta and moved onto public beta. If you haven’t seen it yet, we welcome you to try it and then tell us what you think.

One last new feature is our Template Library. Some of you have asked what the difference is between our templates and spreadsheets and now, you can see the difference. When you create a new spreadsheet, you can choose to create a blank spreadsheet or one from our template library. Currently, we have made available 30+ initial templates for you to choose from. If you have a template that you want to share with the community, you can submit it through our template library browser.

We’ll also be trying out something new this month and next, webinar. Slots are limited, so sign up to learn more about EditGrid and our features.

We think those are pretty exciting stuff, definitely go try them out!

If you’re more interested in knowing what bugs we squashed this month, then check out our Change Log.

Happy Birthday to EditGrid! We are celebrating our first anniversary today and what better way to do it than to celebrate it with Cupid. It’s hard to believe that it has been a year since leaving beta, time really does fly. Here’s a glimpse of what happened in our first year:

• Over 50,000 registered personal users from 30+ countries.
• Great coverage and reviews from the media and success stories from customers and users.
• Partnerships with Central Desktop, Share Methods, Infoteria, Atlassian and others.
• Saw our first spreadsheet reach over a million views, now over 2M+ views

It’s our goal to make EditGrid even better and we will continue to do so by listening to our users’ and customers’ feedback while delivering those improvements regularly with our monthly release. So, just let us know, our door is always open! We look forward to another exciting and successful year ahead. Thanks to our users and customers for helping EditGrid reach where we are today.

With our recent partnership with Atlassian, we have made the EditGrid Confluence plugin available to all Confluence Hosted and Enterprise Hosting customers.

Now, we are excited to announce that in the first quarter of 2008 (yes, that’s right around the corner), Confluence licensing customers will too be able to enjoy real-time collaboration and share virtually everything within their Confluence enterprise wiki. We will be offering two versions of the EditGrid Confluence plugin, a Standalone and a Hosted version. The Standalone version will be shipped with a trimmed down version of the EditGrid server tailored for Confluence customers while the Hosted version will connect to EditGrid’s own infrastruction at editgrid.com.

Complete details of the plugin and pricing are now available on our website.

By the way, if you like what you see, register and pre-order on or before February 18th, 2008 and we’ll be sure to give you a discount. Contact our sales team for more details on the plugin and our discount.