Public Beta 14.5 (rev 4625)

• Various stability and performance improvements

Public Beta 14.4 (rev 4579)

• [#5087] Fixed critical bug where rapid mouse scroll crashes FireFox

Public Beta 14.3 (rev 4570)

• [#5548] Fixed bug on sheet object creation
• [#5538] Fixed bug where public user cloning a spreadsheet with MDF generates exception

Two weeks ago, Seth Godin asked for a websheet that could take a list of book titles and return the cover art from Amazon. The post also mentioned EditGrid.

Today, I’ve got some free time to re-visit this blog post. Is this possible? I asked one of my colleagues. “Give me an hour”, my colleague replied.

And here is what I have from my colleague. The resulting bookshelf is here:

And the spreadsheet:

http://www.editgrid.com/tnc/david/My_Bookshelf

And the XSL to transform the data in spreadsheet into the bookshelf:

http://www.editgrid.com/tnc/david/My_Bookshelf.covers.html.xsl

Right! This is a good showcase of EditGrid’s “My Data Format” (MDF) feature, which has been available since Public Beta 11 released in late August. If you would like to create your own bookshelf, follow these steps:

1. Login with your EditGrid a/c. (Register if you don’t have one.)
2. Click the following link to clone the spreadsheet. The XSL will be copied as well.

http://www.editgrid.com/tnc/david/My_Bookshelf.copy

3. Save it and input your set of information (you’ll need to give the cloned spreadsheet a name).
4. Your bookshelf is now ready via your spreadsheet’s permalink + “.covers.html”.

Yes, that’s how simple it is! You can easily mashup other web services using EditGrid as the data storage and transformation medium. EditGrid’s MDF has allowed a group of expert users to generate KML files for Google Earth.

MDF enables innovation on EditGrid. And there’ll be more!

P.S.

• We use Amazon’s web service to get the book cover image, so we add a link to link to the book in Amazon. Fair deal, right?
• If you would like to use a serious personal bookshelf service, we recommend Anobii, another Hongkong-based Web 2.0 service.

Public Beta 14.2 (rev 4559)

• Sheet object caching
• Fixed back-end memory leak
• [#5228] Fixed bug where HTML publishing cache is not up-to-date

Public Beta 14.1 (rev 4525)

• [#5408] Google Personalized Homepage integration — add EditGrid to your Google Personalized Homepage now
• [#5091] Pageflakes integration — add EditGrid to Pageflakes now
• HTML export and post-to-blog regression
• border redraw optimisation

As some of you may have noticed, EditGrid has become slower lately - It’s mainly because we have a big jump of users in recent months. We do notice it and feel as painful as you do. Our team has been working very hard recently to make EditGrid faster.

Today, we’re glad to inform you all that we’ve successfully deployed EditGrid into a more scalable architecture! It is just our first step, we’ve already planned several items in the coming days to further improve our performance/stability.

Thanks to all the support and we will continue making EditGrid better, faster and more stable!

Public Beta 14 (rev 4446)

The most notable new features in this release are:

• [#5299] Event-driven RTU — EditGrid users have grown accustomed to the RTU feature, whereby co-editors can see each other’s changes in 5 seconds. This re-written version of RTU now goes one step further — changes made by others are instantly updated on your spreadsheet subject to network latency. This will allow even greater responsiveness, and reduce risks of conflict. Currently available to personal users only.
• [#3913] Cell border — yet another frequently requested spreadsheet functionality now available.
• [#5276] IE performance enhancement — fixed a bunch of memory leaks in IE when using EditGrid.

Also deployed since this release is the Brazilian Portuguese version. Congratulations to all contributors to the Portuguese (Brazil) translation spreadsheet, as part of the EditGrid Localisation Project (currently offline - 2008-03-13).

Other new features include:

• [#5356] Support If-Modified-Since header for exports and chart images
• [#5226] Allow password recovery by email address alone
• [#5308] Recent charts list — available at http://www.editgrid.com/recent/charts/
• [#5339] Enabling word wrap would automatically expand row height if necessary

Also fixed in this release are:

• [#5444] Prohibit login with underscore for organisation
• [#5407] Enable text overflow for new spreadsheet by default
• [#5297] Can’t export past revision
• [#5405] Paste cross-sheet formula across spreadsheet appears to work but doesn’t persist
• [#5110] White cell background applied upon exporting
• [#5409] Search2Grid regression
• [#5310] Fixed bug where chart can’t show Simplified Chinese characters
• [#5401] Grid2Map regression

Public Beta 13.7 (rev 4335)

• Accept multiple row/column operation commands in API
• Fixed bug in default font colour
• [#4430] Allow readers of password-protected read-only spreadsheets to view sheet property
• [#5416] Disable My Workspace search scope in EditGrid Finder for public users
• [#5421] Centre-align EditGrid Finder and View in IE

EditGrid stores tables. When data are as structured as tables, searching can yield more than a simple textual search.

I manage my contact lists in EditGrid, some personal, some shared with others. Retrieving the mobile number of, say, William among my business contacts involves the steps of i./ opening the spreadsheet “Business Contacts” in EditGrid, ii./ locating William’s record using “find in spreadsheet” and skipping the wrong Williams, and iii./ scanning through the column headers to fetch the right cell. Is this difficult? Not really. But we believe we can do things better.

Now we have EditGrid Finder. All I need to do is to key in william mobile and, sure enough, the search results page shows a snippet of the Business Contacts spreadsheet which shows the relevant rows, columns and their intersection. I get precisely what I need to know without opening the spreadsheet. And if I want to know more (eg the office number), I can still click on the spreadsheet’s permalink as displayed on the search results page.

What’s more, EditGrid Finder is not limited to stuffs under your workspace. EditGrid Finder allows you to search just your workspace or over all public spreadsheets. Let me show you some examples:

• Remember we’ve some demonstrated EditGrid with real-time data from Yahoo! Finance? Searching for “GOOG Price” gives you the most updated stock quote we’ve retrieved from the sources as stated on http://www.editgrid.com/tnc/finance/ .

• EditGrid Localisation Project contains a set of translation spreadsheets. Searching “insert column spanish” returns you the Spanish translation of the phrase “insert column”.

To start, you can upload your frequently searched data and see if EditGrid Finder can save your time immediately. Soon you will discover that while EditGrid lets you edit data collaboratively with your colleagues and friends, be they price comparisons, bug database or everything you can imagine, EditGrid Finder gives you a tool to search efficiently over them.

EditGrid Finder is just our first step towards making useful data more available. It will become better and better when

• you share your knowledge by contributing more public spreadsheets, and
• you let us know how we can do better at the EditGrid Forum