EditGrid

EditGrid is a Web 2.0 spreadsheet service. It offers both a free-of-charge service to personal users and a subscription service to organisations and is available on a number of partner sites and channels.

EditGrid is one of the players in the emerging market of online spreadsheets along with Google Spreadsheets and Zoho Sheet.

History

EditGrid is developed, provided and maintained by Team and Concepts, a Hong Kong-based company. The first public beta release of EditGrid was launched on 7 April 2006. It registered its 10,000th personal user in November 2006. In January 2007 EditGrid started to offer organisation accounts for free trial and also became available on Salesforce.com's AppExchange platform. On 14 February 2007, EditGrid officially declared out-of-beta and launched its subscription service.

In June 2007, EditGrid announced a $1.25 million series A investment from the WI Harper Group.

Features

Touted as the most advanced and well-polished Ajax-enabled spreadsheet, EditGrid includes features for shared access and online collaboration on top of conventional spreadsheet functionalities. Its Real-Time Update (RTU) feature allows multiple users to see changes on a spreadsheet immediately, and is considered a winning feature among similar products. Its Remote Data feature can retrieve live data on the web, while its My Data Format (MDF) feature allows users to customise the output format using XSLT, such as live KML for Google Earth. Other features include multiple access control levels, revision history, charting, live chat, permalinks and more than 500 spreadsheet functions.

Apart from access from its main site, spreadsheets hosted on EditGrid can be accessed on third-party websites by means of its post-to-blog feature.

In September 2007, the EditGrid iPhone Edition was launched at the Office 2.0 Conference.

Javascript Macro support

In September 2008, EditGrid launched its JavaScript Macro support, enabling user programmed macros to manipulate EditGrid spreadsheets using Javascript (version 1.5) . Within a month of its launch, amongst the first user written custom-built applications is a javascript macro source code animator & debugger currently known as JAGUAR ("JAvascript Generator & User Animated Realtime debugger") that permits logical pause (or "breakpoint") by macro statement number and single cycle execution within the javascript source code, to facilitate macro development in this environment

Because of the nature of the EditGrid macro interface, Firebug (for EditGrid users utilizing the Mozilla Firefox browser), is not particularly helpful in the Editgrid macro environment because the original macro source code is dynamically re-formed. The user written debugger however supports asynchronous interface actions initiated by on-screen spreadsheet buttons or macro supported javascript events including timed functions, HTML "toolboxes" and "pickers", all at original source level. The user written source code is held and edited within an EditGrid spreadsheet, enabling full synchronization of cell references, sheet names and other variables (eg. columns & rows) between the javascript macro source and the related spreadsheet. The macro source is therefore under the control of the fully automatic EditGrid 'save' environment permitting earlier revisions to be re-called with full backup/recovery in the event of server or other errors.

Integration and interoperability

EditGrid is available as a module on Netvibes, Pageflakes and Google Personalized Homepage. EditGrid is also available on Salesforce.com's AppExchange platform.

EditGrid also forms part of the offering of Central Desktop, ShareOffice and ThinkFree Office.

In addition, developers can make use of the EditGrid API to build custom applications. There are a number of EditGrid add-ons that mash up other services. One of these, Grid2Map, turns longitude-latitude pairs into placemarks on Google Maps.

Applications

Multilingualism

In addition to the default English version, EditGrid is available in eight languages: German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese, largely thanks to a community localisation project.

Subscription service

EditGrid is available to organisation users on a software-as-a-service basis. Organisation users enjoy SSL-encrypted traffic, user account administration and management reports on top of the features available to personal users.

Software architecture

EditGrid is developed on an open-source software architecture. It runs on Catalyst as the web application framework and uses Gnumeric as its back-end support. It adopts Ajax technology at the front-end.