Are Social Spreadsheets About to Revolutionize Social Networking and Collaboration?

SocialText recently announced SocialCalc, which is spreadsheet with wiki style collaborative features.* I call this new class of application social spreadsheets. SocialCalc is joined by Google Docs, EditGrid and eXpresso.

I have yet to try SocialCalc and am working on it. I tried both EditGrid and eXpresso and they both work reasonably well. I find the ability of eXpresso and EditGrid to work in excel and update with a click is a very useful feature. I really like the excel plugin for eXpresso, it makes sharing so drop dead simple that it is a no-brainer. I was not able to get the EditGrid plug-in working (I need to upgrade my Excel), but I am trusting that it is as easy. EditGrid’s abilty to use external data as references is great. I was able to enter a function that grabbed data from online databases and displayed the results directly into the spreadsheet (I typed: =techncrunch(“editgrid”,”total_funding”) into the cell and got the result of 1,250,00, its venture funding). This will save me lots of time finding and updating spreadsheets.

Google Docs is the stepchild of this group, its interface is a bit awkward, it is the slowest and it does not have the excel plugin.

Some positioning information – both EditGrid and eXpresso are available on the web and suitable for small and medium businesses (free and paid services are available). EditGrid can also be installed behind the firewall for companies with higher security requirements.

Bottom line: Anyone who has to share a spreadsheet with others should try one or both. Perhaps history will repeat itself and the spreadsheet (with help from Dan Bricklin) will once again be the “killer app”.

* SocialCalc was built using wikiCalc an open source wiki-spreadsheet developed by Dan Bricklin (the co-developer of VisiCalc).