Public Beta 16.3 (rev 5242)
Public Beta 16.2 (rev 5214)
Suppose you have a private spreadsheet which contains sensitive payroll and annual leave information, but you’d like to publish some of the information to staff members for their quick reference. How can you do this with EditGrid’s new feature, linked sheet?
(It really is private — if you’d like to verify, check it out here.)
It’s easy to create a linked sheet. First, on the source, private spreadsheet, create a new sheet, say, “Annual Leave Report”, that contains only the publishable data, but no more.
Then, create a new spreadsheet and grant it the necessary permission for staff members to view. Next, insert a new sheet on this to-be-linked spreadsheet — as usual, you may either make use of the (+) button at the sheet navigation bar, or use the sheet context menu as illustrated below.
Now you can see that there’s a new button called “Link from another spreadsheet”. Click it to expand the toolbox.
Select the right source, that is, in our case, my spreadsheet “IBD Payroll” where we can find the sheet “Annual Leave Report”. The new sheet name is automatically detected. You may also give it a name, say, “IBD Payroll#Annual Leave Report”, later on for easier identification. Click [OK] to confirm.
Bravo! The linked sheet is successfully created. Note that the sheet is copied from our private source at once. Note also the “chain” icon in the sheet tab. Now all users with read permission on this linked spreadsheet, “IBD Annual Leave”, can see the publishable data from the private source. You may even build additional reports based on the source data using ordinary cross-sheet formulae:
Now if you have any updates to the payroll and annual leave data, you don’t need to copy the updates into two spreadsheets: just update them on the source spreadsheet, and users of the linked spreadsheet can retrieve the most up-to-date data from the source spreadsheet via the linked sheet using the Update Linked Sheet function accessible at the sheet context menu.
Don’t repeat yourself, any more!
Resources:
P.S. Only a user with read permission to the source spreadsheet and write permission to the linked spreadsheet can create the link sheet, and afterwards all users with read permission to the linekd spreadsheet can update it. Therefore, you won’t be able to retrieve the sensitive data on the “Staff Record” sheet. Try it — to unlock the linked spreadsheet to gain write permission, the password is IBD.
Public Beta 16.1 (rev 5175)
Public Beta 16 is EditGrid’s biggest major release so far, in terms of both time and effort spent, because we are making big changes! There are so many exciting new features in this release to talk about that I find it difficult to fit all in one blog post — so I won’t. Instead, I’ll split the introduction into multiple parts — some will be on the recently revamped EditGrid Wiki.
The most obvious changes made in this release is the new portal home page. There are now so many useful resources available on EditGrid — just take a look at the US Senate mid-term election results originally posted here or the world oil production data by Roberto — that are waiting for our users to discover. And now we have organised them into recent spreadsheets (RSS), popular spreadsheets (RSS), recent templates (RSS), popular templates (RSS) and random charts on the home page to facilitate you, as well as members of the public, to discover interesting and relevant materials. We have even added a tag cloud for you to browse through related spreadsheets. We’ve refrained from making a tag cloud until we think it useful — now it is.
(A bonus hint: if you’ve ever wondered why your spreadsheet aren’t displayed on the public listings, or how to remove your spreadsheet therefrom, here’s the answer: the public listings include spreadsheets which are public readable without password and public discoverable. To set whether a spreadsheet is public discoverable or not, simply go to the Share with Public tab at Sheet Properties and toggle the option. You may also set your user default at Preferences.)
The new portal home page has already brought about two new concepts: templates and popularity. Popularity is determined by a spreadsheet’s view count, now made available since this release. We’ll talk more about templates in a subsequent post.
Another exciting new feature is the OpenSearch plugin, which allows you to add EditGrid to browser’s search bar. If you use Mozilla FireFox 2.0 or Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, you shall see the search bar button highlighted when you visit EditGrid. Click it, and you may then add EditGrid Finder to your browser’s search bar as one of the available search engine! Performing a spreadsheet search will then be as simple as keying in a query in your browser and pressing [Enter].
That’s it for now — I’ll return to talk more about the other exciting new features, including templates and linked sheet. In the meantime, try out the above new features, and let us know whether you like them or not!
Public Beta 16 (rev 5148)
The most notable new features in this release are:
Starting from this release we are accepting free registration of organisation accounts for free trial. New organisation features rolled out in this release include:
Other new features include:
Also fixed in this release are:
Yesterday the founders of iRows announced that they’ll be joining Google and that the iRows site will be shut down on 31st December, confirming the Techcrunch story two days ago. Here’s the related story on Techcrunch.
iRows was launched in February 2006, two months before EditGrid’s first Public Beta, and has been a strong player in the new-and-emerging arena of online spreadsheets. It’s the first one to support sorting, charting among other features that have since become a must for all online spreadsheets. Many of our features were planned and developed with a strong if subconscious driving force in our mind: we have to better iRows in this. It’s a tough race, intense but dignified — we have never badmouthed them in private and, as far as we are concerned, neither have they. And it’s a race that we’ve been gaining the upper hand lately, according to this comparison spreadsheet by our user siulung. We believe that competition is good to users and will drive everyone forward, and so it’s proved.
We feel deeply about iRows’ termination at the frontline. Where will this leave EditGrid? We’ll continue to stay our course — becoming the best online spreadsheet around while being inter-operable with other great applications on the web and extensible by the world’s developers. We do not fear competition because EditGrid grows better with it.
Salute to iRows (2006 - 2006). Best of luck to Itai and Yoah.
P.S. If you used to be an iRows user, you can switch to EditGrid by exporting your iRows spreadsheets into .xls format and then uploading them into your EditGrid account. Unfortunately the charts on iRows aren’t preserved in the exporting step.
Public Beta 15.8 (rev 4929)
Many people use web spreadsheets as if using their desktop counterparts: to keep contacts, track progress, book-keeping, etc., with the exception that they’re more accessible. However, with the help of a technology called XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations), web spreadsheets can really be something out of your imagination.
XSLT is a technology dating back to the late 90’s. According to the specification, it is “a language for transforming XML documents into other XML documents”. But it has never been limited to generate XML documents only. At least from the examples given, it can be used to generate VRML documents which is non-XML.
So, how is the whole thing related to web spreadsheets?
Spreadsheet is basically a two-dimensional array of data, which can be represented in XML easily (example here: [orig] [XML]). One can create or download an XSLT stylesheet and transform the data into a format that is readable by other computer programs. That could be a mass-mailing engine reading vCal feeds, FireFox reading RSS live bookmarks, or Google Calendar reading iCal files. If you are a GIS zealot, you may be interested plotting spots and paths onto Google Maps. With the multi-user, live editing capability of web spreadsheets, you now have a collaborative, live data backend on the web for many different kinds of services.
Following are some examples can be created by web spreadsheet plus XSLT, can you think more?
1. KML for Google Maps and Google Earth
- It is how GIS zealots using EditGrid!
Valery’s Spreadsheet: http://www.editgrid.com/user/valery35/Locations
XSLT Stylesheet: http://www.editgrid.com/doc/xslt/Locations.paths.kml.xsl
KML file: http://www.editgrid.com/doc/xslt/Locations.paths.kml
Here is what you get on Google Maps: http://maps.google.com/…/Locations.paths.kml
2. iCal for Apple iCal
- Import spreadsheet to calendar programs - besides Apple iCal, it also works with MS Outlook/ Google Calendar and Mozilla Calendar!
Spreadsheet: http://www.editgrid.com/doc/xslt/EditGrid_Release_Schedule
XSLT Stylesheet: http://www.editgrid.com/doc/xslt/EditGrid_Release_Schedule.ics.xsl
ICS file: http://www.editgrid.com/doc/xslt/EditGrid_Release_Schedule.ics
Result on Google Calendar: http://www.google.com/…/EditGrid_Release_Schedule.ics
3. RSS Live Bookmark for Mozilla FireFox
- With this, together with remote data fetch, all data on web can be read by RSS…
Spreadsheet: http://www.editgrid.com/doc/xslt/Bookmark
XSLT Stylesheet: http://www.editgrid.com/doc/xslt/Bookmark.rss.xsl
Result in Google Reader: http://www.google.com/reader/…/Bookmark.rss
4. Music Playlist for different music players
- Which player you’re using?
Playlist spreadsheet: http://www.editgrid.com/doc/xslt/Songs
For Winamp, XMMS, Realplayer and Window Media Player - Try this:
XSLT Stylesheet: http://www.editgrid.com/doc/xslt/Songs.m3u.xsl
Result: http://www.editgrid.com/doc/xslt/Songs.m3u (P.S. M3U also support many other different players)
For other playlist formats, like M3U Ext., PLS, SMIL and XSPF, goes here and you will found all these formats available.
5. FusionCharts
- Well, we never limit your choice to create charts
Spreadsheet: http://www.editgrid.com/doc/xslt/Oil_Production
XSLT Spreadsheet: http://www.editgrid.com/doc/xslt/Demo_of_My_Data_Format
Result: http://www.editgrid.com/doc/xslt/Oil_Production/World!E1?content-type=text/html
Let see how our users use EditGrid with XSLT, with their expert knowledge + imagination, here are some examples of what happening in EditGrid commuity — showing the unlimited possibility:
http://bbs.keyhole.com/…Number=593848
http://semant.blogspot.com/../adding-triples-using-editgrid.html
http://bbs.keyhole.com/…/Main/609661/
http://www.digitalgeography.co.uk/…the-possibilities-are-endless/
Public Beta 15.7 (rev 4890)
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