Home EditGrid – New Online Spreadsheet, Better Than Google Spreadsheets

EditGrid – New Online Spreadsheet, Better Than Google Spreadsheets

Written by Gang Lu and Richard MacManus

EditGrid, the main product of HongKong-based company
Team and Concepts (TnC) Ltd., is a leading Web 2.0 online spreadsheet service that
focuses on online collaboration and interoperability. Having had 1 year of development
and 9 months of public beta with 18 beta releases, yesterday EditGrid officially
announced its subscription service and removed the beta tag from its site. We spoke with
TnC’s founder and Chairman, David Lee, a brilliant young man who was recently nominated
by BusinessWeek as one of Asia’s
Best Entrepreneurs under 25
. Also in this post we outline EditGrid’s main features
and discuss why it’s better than Google Spreadsheets.

The online spreadsheet market is crowded and the big players include Google Spreadsheets (as part of Google Docs &
Spreadsheets), Zoho Sheet (as part of the Zoho
Office Suite — disclosure, Zoho is a R/WW sponsor), WikiCalc (a part of SocialText), ThinkFree Calc (as part of Thinkfree Office). But
EditGrid is the only standalone online spreadsheet offering.

Features and comparison with Google Spreadsheets

EditGrid boasts real-time-update (RTU), allowing users to see changes immediately when
someone is editing the same spreadsheet, and extensive collaboration features. It has a
feature called Remote data, which fetches data from the web (e.g. stock information and
foreign exchange data) and puts it into a spreadsheet. Also EditGrid has many more
functions available than Google Spreadsheet – EditGrid has over 500 functions (like SUM
() etc), whereas Google Spreadsheet has 230+; at least according to this EditGrid
comparison
of EditGrid to Goog Spreadsheets and MS Excel 2003.

David Lee told us that although they are not the full solution to Web Office, in terms
of offering a suite of products, they think that EditGrid is a better standalone
spreadsheet product than its competition. However we think partnerships and integration into other
products is going to be key to their success.

We were particularly impressed by the toolbox and charts (see the screenshot below).
The document-sharing, live chats, etc., are also very impressive. There are really too
many features to list here, but check out the full product tour if
interested. Also EditGrid’s development team maintains a very informative changelog and future plan

EditGrid intergrated into other products

With its agile architecture that facilitates integration and embedding into enterprise
application platforms, strong data manipulation and distribution capabilities and high
usability, EditGrid is ideal for integrating into existing platforms. Right now EditGrid
is integrated into start pages
Netvibes
,
Pageflakes
and
Google Personalized Homepage
. It is also integrated into Salesforce
AppExchange
and several SaaS products and platforms. [Ed: there is also going to
be announcement early next week of another Web Office vendor using EditGrid – stay tuned
to R/WW for that news]

Some other facts and figures… With its EditGrid Localization Project, EditGrid
has been translated into 9 languages by its users. It has 15,000+
registered personal users from 30+ countries, 200+
trial organizations and 4,500+ trial organization users have created
+23,000 spreadsheets.

David Lee told us that personal users can still enjoy free service, but they have a
new subscription service that allows organizations to utilize EditGrid – which has added
security, administration and customization features. It is $5 per user per month, and
academic and non-profit organizations get a 50% discount.

Conclusion

It’s great to see innovative Web Office technology coming out of Asia and taking on
the big guns in the US. EditGrid is indeed an excellent standalone product, in many
respects better than Google Spreadsheets. If it successfully partners with existing
platforms (e.g. start pages and Salesforce), then it stands a good chance of competing
with the Office Suite offerings of Google, Zoho, ThinkFree et al. In a sense, EditGrid
takes the ‘best-of-breed’ theory of Web apps even further – by creating a specialist Web
Office app that is best in class, but also requires partnerships with other vendors to be
truly successful.


click image to view full-size screenshot

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