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.

Seems our blog widget has had some nice pick-up. Zillow just used EditGrid to post their Q1 Home Value Report data to their blog.

Spreadsheets as an investment tool? You bet! You can do exactly that with EditGrid! At CurrencyTrading.net, they agree and we were listed as one of their Next-gen investing tools for amateur and professional traders.

Locally in Hong Kong, stock traders/enthusiasts have already taken EditGrid to another level with their investment spreadsheets, including adr, which reached over a million views. Other popular investment spreadsheets include all in one and Markets Monitor. Those spreadsheets simply provide stock market information for investors to make decisions on but there are users who use EditGrid to manage their investment portfolios as well.

Good stuff? We’d like to think so. But we want you guys to tell us that, so give it a try and see for yourself.

To get started with EditGrid as an investment tool, sign up for an account (if you haven’t already). We have included our stock portfolio template for download to get you started on buidling your investment portfolio and tracking its performance. You’ll need to know a bit about our Remote Data feature to use it.

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.