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VisiCalc Creator Developing WikiCalc
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet has an article about a new wiki that is trying to combine the collaboration of wiki technology and the data manipulation attributes of a spreadsheet. The creator of VisiCalc, Dan Bricklin, is working on an alpha version of WikiCalc for sometime late in February." From the article: "'It holds a lot of promise, both because it's using the spreadsheet metaphor, which is the one thing people know for working with quantitative information and because 'there's nobody better in the world to build this thing,' said Ross Mayfield, CEO of collaboration software maker SocialText. To Mayfield, WikiCalc is the answer to a problem that has been percolating for some time in the world of IT. That is, he said, that spreadsheets have traditionally been a single-user application screaming for functionality that could let multiple people edit data quickly and easily. "
"With (Excel), you get people playing e-mail volleyball with attachments all day long, so it's grossly inefficient," Mayfield said. "How do you track changes on a spreadsheet? What happens if you don't have just two people going back and forth, (but) have a finance department of 40 people trying to roll up numbers."
Share the workbook and multiple people can edit at the same time. I do this daily and have been using this feature for quite some time. Changes are highlighted w/notes on who made what change whenever you save. I haven't played "e-mail volleyball" regarding spreadsheets.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
We have conference calls sitting around an excel sheet populated by other data, and we make our updates, save 'em, and let the main conference holders know, they reload, and its all populated and shared. In near-real time. And we use net meeting, too.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
I know there isn't an opensharepoint yet, but MS Sharepoint lets you do much of what they discuss. It was developed for exactly the same reasons, and it does a pretty good job if people know it and use it.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Dabble DB
On the Tools menu, click Share Workbook, and then click the Editing tab.
Select the Allow changes by more than one user at the same time check box.
Click the Advanced tab.
Under Track changes, click Keep change history for, and in the Days box, type the number of days of change history (change history: In a shared workbook, information that is maintained about changes made in past editing sessions. The information includes the name of the person who made each change, when the change was made, and what data was changed.) that you want to keep.
Be sure to enter a large-enough number of days because Microsoft Excel permanently erases any change history older than this number of days.
Click OK, and if prompted to save the file, click OK.
easy enough. Straght from TFM
Umm... NO, read the artical linked. Read the snpped section below and note how it specificly says "No ActiveX".
So what happened, exactly, to get the spreadsheet in the browser? Behind the scenes, Excel Services opened the file the sales analyst saved to SharePoint, refreshed any external data in the spreadsheet, calculated any formulas, and rendered the results in the browser. Specifically, Excel services sends only DHTML to the browser (no ActiveX), so the sales manager could be using any modern browser. The result is a very high-fidelity version of the analysis that the sales manager can interact with in the browser or, if they have permissions to do so, open up back in Excel. One point I want to make clear is that Excel 12 is the authoring tool for spreadsheets that run on Excel Services.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
There's already Microsoft SharePoint out there already that allows you to do just that... and it's been out there for quite some time now too.
Karma: Positive. Mostly effected by cowbell.