Browsing Category: "Collaboration"
Google Spreadsheets - Part Deux
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Last night I was preparing a spreadsheet for discussion with my brother about an investment. My original intent was to create the spreadsheet and email it to him. Any questions he had would be presumably dealt with via email or telephone. I started up my desktop when I realized something. I had reformatted earlier in the month and didn’t reinstall MS Office. I had no spreadsheet application to run.
Sans Excel, I went ahead and used Google Sheets and created the spreadsheet. I was finished and was about to email the sheet to my brother. Then I saw that my brother was online in my left pane in Gmail (GTalk). So I went to my finished spreadsheet and clicked on the “Share” tab in the document and sent the sheet to my brother.
He then clicked on the link he received and we were both viewing the same document. I knew this because I saw him as “viewing” in the “Share” tab. I then clicked on the “Discuss” tab to get a dialog going.
We were both in a chat room now on the sidebar while viewing the sheet. His cell focus was shown in Green, mine in Blue. We could talk via chat while pointing to cells and collaboratively making changes to the sheet.
In an ah hah! moment my brother said what I thought “This is cool!” Yes it was. It was the perfect collaboration tool for what we were doing. Another great feature of Google Sheets is that it revisions your documents. In our document we made some minor changes. The changes are viewable via you guessed it - the “Revisions” tab.
My hat goes off to Google for this excellent tool. I tried Google Sheets before, but it is quite a different thing to actually use it. MS Excel is the most used application on my typical computer second only to Firefox for web browsing. Though I used Sheets before, it appears that they have since made it more responsive and easier. I could barely tell I was using an online application. Perhaps the best part is knowing I won’t get a .dll error from my spreadsheet program (MS Excel).
The next step that will take Google Sheets dangerously close to challenge MS Excel is to integrate Google Gears. Google Gears allows web apps to have offline functionality and sync back when online again. I believe this will be Google’s killer little tool in years to come. It is the one enhancement I’m pining for.
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Sunrocket Shutting its Doors :o(
Here’s the email I received today. I was hoping the buzz on the web was wrong… Luckily this happened right before I was about to print some new business cards.
Here’s the email I received below:
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Some activeCollab Style
I found a good blog about changing the style of activeCollab to jazz it up a bit here. Thanks to this guy for the enhancement. Ilija is going to add theme support in a latter release to make it easier in the future. This is some wholesome open-source goodness.
P.S. This is not the official logo of activeCollab. The logo has not been finalized yet. This one was one of my favorites under consideration.
