We've been suggesting improvements to Google Spreadsheets, but I wonder – what is the tool perfect for right now, even in this early stage?
Some ideas:
Friendly Fitness Tracker – gather a bunch of friends who want to lose weight, eat healthy, and exercise and track it together all one big spreadsheet
Office Pooler – manage the sports betting at work using a spreadsheet that the oraganizers can add to, and everyone can see
Family Budgetizer – oraganize the spending for yourself right next to the spending for your wife and teenager.
Any other suggestions?
And if anyone wants to build any of these templates and give it away for free, let me know. I could use all three!
|
Group Chat! It is the only way to do group chat with Google right now.
G Talk / Gmail chat don't allow it yet. |
Sam, OMG you cracked me up, so funny, LOL. |
> It is the only way to do group chat with Google right now.
Hey, what about Writely? That supports group-chat too...
I've heard Joel Spolsky say most people use Excel for plain lists!
<<When we were designing Excel 5.0, the first major release to use serious activity-based planning, we only had to watch about five customers using the product before we realized that an enormous number of people just use Excel to keep lists. They are not entering any formulas or doing any calculation at all! We hadn't even considered this before. Keeping lists turned out to be far more popular than any other activity with Excel. And this led us to invent a whole *slew* of features that make it easier to keep lists: easier sorting, automatic data entry, the AutoFilter feature which helps you see a slice of your list, and multi-user features which let several people work on the same list at the same time while Excel automatically reconciles everything.
While Excel 5 was being designed, Lotus had shipped a "new paradigm" spreadsheet called Improv. According to the press releases, Improv was a whole new generation of spreadsheet, which was going to blow away everything that existed before it. (...)
Of course, Improv is now a footnote in history. (...)
Why? Because in Improv, it was almost impossible to just make lists. The Improv designers thought that people were using spreadsheets to create complicated multi-dimensional financial models. Turns out, if they asked people, they would discover that making lists was so much more common than multi-dimensional financial models, and in Improv, making lists was a downright *chore*, if not impossible.>>
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/fog0000000249.html |
its more fun to make lists in excel then do a finance model in excel!!
trust me ..heheheh |
Cool quote, Phillip. I found the link here:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000065.html |
Phillip: that make me thinking about what I was doing with XLS. And indeed more than 50% of the times I use XLS it is with data exported from other applications. And what is that called? Indeed lists. The other lesser 50% I do use it for calculations etc.
BTW watching exported data gives a lot less problems with Open Office that handles the data better. It's a pitty that Open Office isn't adopted by Google as the Web Office System. And BTW doesn't Open Office have German roots? |
> And BTW doesn't Open Office have German roots?
Indeed. I found this – OpenOffice is based on StarOffice:
<<StarOffice was originally developed by the German company StarDivision, founded by Marco Börries in 1986. The development of the integrated StarOffice started at the end of 1994. Until version 4.2 StarOffice was based on the platform independent C++ class library StarView.
The company and the rights to StarOffice were acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999 for US$73.5 million, as Sun was seeking to compete with Microsoft Office. Sun soon offered StarOffice 5.2 as a free download for personal use.
Sun then went through a similar exercise to Netscape's release of Mozilla by open-sourcing most of the StarOffice code-base. The resultant open-source codebase is developed as OpenOffice.org and is contributed to by both Sun and the open source community. Sun then takes a "snapshot" of the OpenOffice.org code base, integrates proprietary and third-party code modules and markets the package commercially.
In September 2005 Sun released StarOffice 8, adding support for the OpenDocument standard and a number of improvements (based on the OpenOffice.org 2 code).>>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice |
