Bookmapping for K-12 students: With this activity students use GIS (Geographic Information Systems) technology as part of a reading activity. Using EditGrid and other location tools such as Maporama, teachers and students can create interactive digital maps that relate to what is being read. This strategy is multidisciplinary in it’s mix of reading with other subject areas such as social studies, geography, history, and science, along with technology.

This activity makes maps change from a passive activity in school to one that is constructive and interactive. This activity puts the students in control as they discover the relationship between place and their reading content. Students can read from their texts, then analyze the information to determine locations from the story setting. With that information they can create map points onto a digital map, adding to it comments or quotations.

EditGrid also allows students to collaborate online or in person to develop interactive maps. Using this online spreadsheet tool, a student or teacher creates a spreadsheet and then give permission for others to be able to add more information to the table. By creating a spreadsheet with columns for the name, description, latitude, and longitude of a place the program will then plot the points on a map. Students can go online to see the map, then use the link to the spreadsheet to add their own information for the next point. One example of a story map was created for a class concerning the book Stormbreaker. For each chapter, the readers attempted to identify the location of the story, if it is a real place, or if not then its approximate location from the description.

I am using it in a very simple way, I use it check availability of a squad for an indoor cricket team. So a simple grid with the columns being the fixture dates and the squad members as the rows. The spreadsheet is then embedded in a team blog site and the team members simply fill in Y or N to show if they are available. I also use basic formulas for calculting how many games each person has played to determine the match fees.

The absolutely key feature that makes this work for me is that you allow anonymous update by anyone, all the other spreadsheet competitors required you to set up user name and password. If I had to that them the team would not have used the tool. Most of my team are senior business execs so getting them to add yet another user name and password just to fill out the spreadsheet would have killed it.

So, for me what makes your tool so useful is not so much how close it is to Excel, but the fact it is an easy to use web based table tool allowing input and update.

I manage a team of 33 remote reference librarians scattered across 17 branches of our 20-branch public library system. EditGrid is invaluable to us for keeping our staff up-to-date on contact information and the running schedule of live chat hours. The latter can change several times within a week, if staff need substitutes.

I will say that, though these are the only two documents I post through your site, EditGrid is a lifesaver for us.

The fact that through EditGrid I can make as many updates as I want, as often as I want–and quickly–makes all the difference in keeping my team current on their schedule.

Boston Cares is a volunteer agency that connects volunteers with volunteering opportunities. We offer 150+ organized, team-based service events in and around Boston every month. All of our projects are led by volunteer Project Leaders, and that is where EditGrid comes in.

Every month, I organize the available project for the next month and put them in the EditGrid spread sheet. I then send out an html version of the spreadsheet to volunteer leaders and they sign up for events. The great benefit of this system is the live spreadsheet capabilities - since I update the spreadsheet whenever a leader signs up for an event, the other leaders are always looking at the most updated copy.

The older process was that I would send out an Excel file every day with an updated version of the projects. This was cumbersome, clogged people’s inboxes, and the spreadsheet would be outdated as soon as a leader signed up for an event. Over 90% of our leaders who answered our survey said that they prefer the new spreadsheet to our older system.

Using EditGrid has made my life easier, and it is also more visually appealing and professional for the volunteer Project Leaders.

I’m a fanatic of charts. A week ago, one of my friends in the VC world throw me a use case - He is tracking a bunch of startups which he wants to compare traffic and unique visitors.

Here is the template we come up with:
http://www.editgrid.com/tnc/david/Web2Tracker.new

Neat? This template allows tracking of 12 groups of websites, max. 8 in each group. For each site entered, links to its respective Alexa, Compete, Crunchbase, Del.icio.us search, Google Blogsearch and Technorati search are automatically generated with simple spreadsheet function: hyperlink() and concatenate().

Even more interesting, by entering group number in respective cells in sheet “Alexa Charts” and “Compete Charts“, respective Alexa/Compete charts can be loaded into the spreadsheet. You can configure the options to load different type of charts such as: Alexa’s reach, rank and pageviews; Compete’s unique visitors, attention, average stay and page/visit, etc.. This was done with a EditGrid unique feature called dynamic remote image, which load image according to URL stored in a cell. The URL can be dynamically generated with spreadsheet functions such as concatenate().

Here’s a few interesting notes you may like to take away:

1. The Chart URL in websites (including Alexa, Compete, Y! Finance, Bloomberg, Reuters, etc. etc.) can be easily understood. The parameters are usually embedded in the URL, e.g.
http://home.compete.com.edgesuite.net/www.techcrunch.com_uv_310.png

The above will show the unique visitor (”uv”) chart of Techcrunch (www.techcrunch.com) of width 310px (”310″). You can easily guess it right after playing with the compete site for a few minutes.

2. With understanding of the parameters in URL, you can easily write a concatenate() function to concatenate the “parameters” into the URL. e.g.

=concatenate(”http://home.compete.com.edgesuite.net/”,A1,”_”,A2,”_310.png”)

This will give the above URL if A1 is storing “www.techcrunch.com”, A2 is storing “uv”. If A1 now change to “www.readwriteweb.com”, the URL will be pointing to the respective chart of Read/Write Web instead.

3. To insert dynamic images, you click “insert” -> “images…”, then input the cell reference of the concatenate() result, e.g. B1. So, whenever A1 change to a new domain or A2 change to a new chart type, the images will be reloaded automatically.

4. Loading images from other websites can be sometimes questionable. The web2.0 world has a nice name for it: mash-up. In EditGrid, we just want to provide a generic features for our users to make those charts work for them. I hope this is ok and there won’t be an “Alexaholic incident” happen to us.

5. To copy the above templates for your own use, just add “.new” at the end of the URL and hit return. Yes, turning an EditGrid spreadsheet into a template is as easy as this.

Have fun with EditGrid.

P.S. Some new features currently in our pipeline can make spreadsheet templates like this a few times more powerful. There will be a lot coming from EditGrid in 2008!

Wow! EditGrid is one of the five finalists of the Crunchies Best Enterprise Start-up! This is really a big big surprise to us. Thanks so much for all your nominations. Voting is now open, you can cast your vote here.

The happiest thing of all is that we are listed side by side with 37signals - a company we truly admire. We talked about them and learn from their products and philosophies since the early days of EditGrid development.

Also congratulations to our friends at Atlassian for being nominated as the best international startup. They and 37signals are setting a high bar for Enterprise 2.0. We at EditGrid are working hard to catch up with them.

Merry Christmas!

I used EditGrid for our fantasy baseball draft. We had two of twelve participants draft their teams from remote locations including one guy who was in Korea. They were able to enter their picks manually into a spreadsheet and follow along as I updated it with the picks of the other participants who were present at our draft. The chat feature helped me to keep in touch with them as we went. It worked out great for us.

Spreadsheets as an investment tool? You bet! You can do exactly that with EditGrid! At CurrencyTrading.net, they agree and we were listed as one of their Next-gen investing tools for amateur and professional traders.

Locally in Hong Kong, stock traders/enthusiasts have already taken EditGrid to another level with their investment spreadsheets, including adr, which reached over a million views. Other popular investment spreadsheets include all in one and Markets Monitor. Those spreadsheets simply provide stock market information for investors to make decisions on but there are users who use EditGrid to manage their investment portfolios as well.

Good stuff? We’d like to think so. But we want you guys to tell us that, so give it a try and see for yourself.

To get started with EditGrid as an investment tool, sign up for an account (if you haven’t already). We have included our stock portfolio template for download to get you started on buidling your investment portfolio and tracking its performance. You’ll need to know a bit about our Remote Data feature to use it.

We’ve got more great uses out of EditGrid, besides the lunch expense and CS log, we take it a bit further and use it for localization. Our localization project (currently rebuilding), has been a big part of EditGrid since we started building EditGrid. We allow our user community or anyone for that matter to translate our site to their local language. To date, with efforts from the community, we have made nine languages available on EditGrid, German, Spanish, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, and English.

It’s a very simple process, localization spreadsheets are made publicly readable and writable and open to any user or visitor to contribute. Simply add the local translations next to the English definitions and when translations reach at least 60% completion, the language will be added to the EditGrid site.

If you’d like to learn the details of how our localization work, read the Methodology section of our Localization Project page or if you’d like to use a similar localization engine, you’ll need to sign up to our service and dive into our API and you’ll be able to setup the same collaborative translation environment.

If your local language is not available for translation and would like to begin translating EditGrid to your language, let us know by sending an email to cs@editgrid.com.

Aside from the fun with our lunch expense spreadsheet, we do use EditGrid for some actual business work here in the office. One of our business uses is our customer service log, which tracks users and customers feedback, issues and requests. This is the simplest use of the spreadsheet, there aren’t any calculations and it was strictly created for the customer service representatives to collaborate on.

Customer service is important at any onilne services and it’s no different at EditGrid. We collect everything the visitors and users throw at us through emails and our support forum.

Our customer service team, including myself, uses a shared spreadsheet and are able to edit records without affecting one another. Our spreadsheet introduces a different approach to logging user issues compared to using standard web form that majority of customer service department use in their company’s intranet. The team have found this to be very useful and with EditGrid Finder, we are able to search for past issues, requests and feedback as well.

This could be a perfect solution for those who are seeking to log their user feedback but are on a budget or without sufficient resources to develop their own in-house customer log solution.