The Olympics spirit is riding high across the world and it’s especially crazy in China and Hong Kong. Hong Kong is a co-host of the XXIX Olympiad held in Beijing, China and the Equestrian events are being held here.

Besides the actual competition, everyone is always interested to know if their countrymen and women are bringing home any hardware. The Beijing Olympics is something special and the medals being awarded includes both the spirit of the Olympics and traditional Chinese culture and by far the best design in the recent Olympics.

It’s too bad our team can’t be on the podium collecting those awesome medals in person. Actually, that’s not true, we are collecting Olympic medals, medal counts in a spreadsheet, that is.

The Olympic medal standings spreadsheet uses the web_table() function to extract data from the results page of the official Beijing 2008 Olympics website.

37signals has a good post on why we can do away with phone support and I couldn’t agree more. I have had my fair share of bad experiences as well.

As part of the customer support team, I want to briefly share what goes on here at EditGrid. Online support has been very important to us and it’s been working well. Phone support on the other hand, would not work as well, considering our geographic location and our users and being a startup, there’s no need to outsource to some call center in India. I wouldn’t consider putting our users and customers through that even if that was an option.

We offer several channels to help our customers, our support forum, help center and email, with our help center being a one-way street. We also monitor Twitter and trying out Get Satisfaction, so your voices won’t go unanswered.

All these channels may sound like a handful, and it is, but they’re absolutely manageable and extremely efficient. We have had positive feedback from our users and are able to meet our commitment, answering all requests in a timely fashion, meaning within one business day.

Admittedly, there are times where we missed a request or two or take a little longer to reply. If that’s you, kindly remind us, but we’d understand if you want to give us an ear full instead (we just ask that you keep it clean). We’ll continue to look for ways to improve so it won’t happen again.

With our users’ enthusiastic submissions, our team watched the coming of our 100th Featured Spreadsheet, published just earlier this week!

Since the very first Featured Spreadsheet came out, we’ve visited more than 1000 pieces of nicely made spreadsheets now. Looking through these various spreadsheets is a fruitful and engaging experience. We understand more of your EditGrid usages on areas like finance, and SMEs. Our team’s got thrilled by these skills and designs. We trully enjoy it!

We hope to highlight everyone the most exciting, and popular EditGrid spreadsheets. A piece of new featured spreadsheet gets published every two or three days. In general, these spreadsheets gain a visitor boost of at least 200 per day while it is exhibited at the upper left corner of the EditGrid webpage. All published featured spreadsheets will be stored at the Featured Spreadsheet page and get displayed later on at the upper left exhibit section.

Look forward to the birth of the next 100 Featured Spreadsheets. Submit us your spreadsheets and let’s speed this process up together!

We are introducing two major improvements in this month’s release, one being our redesigned workspace and the other is the optimization of our grid. We have also added two new ecommerce remote data packs.

Redesigned Workspace

You’ve probably noticed your EditGrid workspace looks different today. The revamped workspace offers three improvements, the use of AJAX, a left sidebar and a filter function. Our goal is to offer a workspace where users can get what they need effortlessly and efficiently.

• AJAX dialog windows
  By using AJAX in our workspace, we have introduced a faster and smoother interface to our workspace. Instead of loading new pages for each action, i.e. edit tag, edit note, upload, sharing, etc., like the previous workspace, all these actions are now done on the fly and changes will be reflected immediately in the book list.
• Left sidebar
  The addition of the left sidebar improves file browsing capabilities. In addition to the standard All/Active/Archived spreadsheet views, a tag-list and owner-list view (sorted alphabetically) can also be found. If you have tagged a keyword with your spreadsheets, you can locate it quickly by clicking on the tag. Likewise, if you are working with your collaborators, you can access the those spreadsheets by clicking on the owner in the owner-list.
• Filter function
  The filter function is perfect for locating any spreadsheet in your workspace. If you know the name of the spreadsheet or partial name of the spreadsheet you need access to, type it in the filter box and will display matching results in the books list.

Optimized Grid

In the past, we have gotten feedback from our users telling us the performance of EditGrid is on the slow side. In this release, we have made performance improvements to the grid and you’ll experience a faster response time when performing the following actions:

• Opening smaller sized sheets
• Resizing columns/rows of any size
• Navigating between sheets
• Resizing browser window
• Scrolling (most significant in IE6 and noticeable in FF2, IE7)
• Cursor movements

New Remote Data Packs

We have added two new remote data packs, Amazon and eBay. Now you have access to ecommerce data to further enhance your EditGrid spreadsheets. Both Amazon and eBay data packs will allow you to search for products by keywords and gather detail product information you are looking for, all within your spreadsheet.

The lucky few should be getting their iPhone 3G on launch day in Hong Kong. There has been as much talk about the price as they have about the phone as the announced $199/$299USD price tag is not to be found anywhere. There has also been buzz around the net earlier about Hong Kong having the best deal anywhere.

We weren’t exactly sold on the reports and created a price comparison spreadsheet highlighting our Yahoo! Finance Currency remote data function which compares the price plans between providers across the globe. You’ll see that Hong Kong is among the cheapest, but as we found out, Australia offers an even cheaper price plan than Hong Kong.

So, what happened on the first day of iPhone mania here? Nothing really and to my surprise, there were no lines at any of the 3 Hong Kong stores I went by, total opposite of other parts of the world. Instead, 3 Hong Kong offered exclusivity to 500 randomly picked individuals who previously registered online and 1000 VIP customers on the first day of sale. The rest will have to wait until tomorrow.

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!

Just like how we are required to have an ICQ account here at EditGrid, we are bringing back some of the features found in the old EditGrid website. We are the classics type here. For those unfamiliar with the old site, I’ll fill you in quickly here.

Previously, we list the most popular spreadsheets in our front page, unfiltered, have a look at the results found in Internet Archive Wayback Machine and see for yourself. We have found over the course of redesigning our new website in the latter part of 2007 that displaying popular spreadsheets was a hit with users and visitors and have had harsh criticism when we changed it.

So here we are, the latest design in our website which includes a Featured Spreadsheets section highlighting the most exciting and popular spreadsheets created by our users and the EditGrid Team, a rebirth of our popular spreadsheets found in the past designs. These featured spreadsheets are submitted by our users and reviewed by our team before going on the mainsite, an opposite approach to our earlier website. We also have crawlers team members search through the EditGrid community for the coolest spreadsheets available.

Have a look at our latest redesign and let us know what you think!

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.