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.

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.

Here is what we have to kick start 2008. We name this the Crunchies Special release to celebrate EditGrid being nominated as one of the finalist of the Crunchies Best Enterprise Startup Award.

We’ve 2 new features in this release.

Mashup Function: Image(). Online spreadsheet is interesting because it has more flexibilities to interact with the world of web services. The “Image()” function fetches live images/charts from other web services into a spreadsheet cell. The function can be used to fetch charts dynamically based on values stored in cells, I’ve made a template for you to try it now!

Charts from Alexa, Compete, Yahoo! Finance, Bloomberg, etc. etc. can be fetched dynamically into cells, providing an easy way for user to aggegrate and interact with these content. With this function, users can also create in-cell charts with Google Chart’s API.

Merge Cells! That’s right! It’s finally here. In our first release of 2008, the long awaited Merge Cell feature is out the development doors and into our users’ hands. It’s been a long time coming and we are estatic that we are able to offer this feature as we know this what you all have been looking for. So, why did it take so long? We already have a text overflow feature that serves 80% of the purpose, also we are committed to quality and do our very best to separate ourselves from others.

This release also include the 2 new integrations:

EditGrid Plugin for Confluence. EditGrid partners with Atlassian to offer EditGrid as the default plugin for Confluence hosted customers.

EditGrid App for Facebook. If you are using both EditGrid and Facebook. I highly recommend you to use EditGrid App on facebook to enjoy the integrated sharing and collaboration experience.

These represents EditGrid’s continous effort to reach out more users through integrating with enterprise and social platforms. Details of these integrations will be covered in seperate blog posts.

As with any updates or releases, we’d love to hear what you think and if you have encountered any issues or pesky bugs with this month’s release or with our service in general, please send an email to us, with the issues you are having or report them at our support forums.

For the complete list and details of the new features, enhancements and bug fixes, head over to our Change Log or better yet, sign in and give them a try.

Look for more to come in 2008!

We’ve got more great uses out of EditGrid, besides the lunch expense and CS log, we take it a bit further and use it for localization. Our localization project (currently rebuilding), has been a big part of EditGrid since we started building EditGrid. We allow our user community or anyone for that matter to translate our site to their local language. To date, with efforts from the community, we have made nine languages available on EditGrid, German, Spanish, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, and English.

It’s a very simple process, localization spreadsheets are made publicly readable and writable and open to any user or visitor to contribute. Simply add the local translations next to the English definitions and when translations reach at least 60% completion, the language will be added to the EditGrid site.

If you’d like to learn the details of how our localization work, read the Methodology section of our Localization Project page or if you’d like to use a similar localization engine, you’ll need to sign up to our service and dive into our API and you’ll be able to setup the same collaborative translation environment.

If your local language is not available for translation and would like to begin translating EditGrid to your language, let us know by sending an email to cs@editgrid.com.

Aside from the fun with our lunch expense spreadsheet, we do use EditGrid for some actual business work here in the office. One of our business uses is our customer service log, which tracks users and customers feedback, issues and requests. This is the simplest use of the spreadsheet, there aren’t any calculations and it was strictly created for the customer service representatives to collaborate on.

Customer service is important at any onilne services and it’s no different at EditGrid. We collect everything the visitors and users throw at us through emails and our support forum.

Our customer service team, including myself, uses a shared spreadsheet and are able to edit records without affecting one another. Our spreadsheet introduces a different approach to logging user issues compared to using standard web form that majority of customer service department use in their company’s intranet. The team have found this to be very useful and with EditGrid Finder, we are able to search for past issues, requests and feedback as well.

This could be a perfect solution for those who are seeking to log their user feedback but are on a budget or without sufficient resources to develop their own in-house customer log solution.

To start our series of our own use cases, I’d like to introduce a fun way we do things at EditGrid.

After joining EditGrid couple months back, I’ve been having lunch with other the team members almost everyday and have found out they have created a spreadsheet to track everyone’s lunch expenses. It’s quite simple really, one person pays the entire bill and afterwards, back at the office, those who attended will edit the lunch expense spreadsheet with the price of their lunch into a cell under their name for that particular date.

There’s no difference in how much an individual spend, the spreadsheet takes into account the individual cost, so splurge all you want or be frugal as you like and the system will calculate the individual’s cost and ranks them amongst our team. The person having the highest negative balance will be the one responsible for paying the bill. There have been occasions where we use the iPhone on location to check who the responsible person is. There’s really no escaping and no free lunch here!

I’m sure there are similar cases out there but I am guessing it’s through sending emails, modifying the spreadsheet in a shared drive or playing hot potato with the spreadsheet in an email attachment. But, if you have done something similar in EditGrid, we do encourage you to share your story with us!

Sure, this might not seem to be the most productive but it’s fun and convenient and it illustrates a lot of what EditGrid offers, collaboration, calculations and mobility. Now, there’s no more messing around with looking for change and the countless number of IOUs, which sometimes goes forgotten.