Wiki spreadsheets, city budgets, wikicalc vs jot.com vs editgrid.com

The next wave of wiki's is out, and hallelujah, they don't (all / totally) suck. Here to say editgrid.com is fantastic.

Meet the contenders:

Let me spare you the details to start out with (besides, everything listed alphabetically puts editgrid in first anyhow)

editgrid.com: comin' at ya live from Hong Kong, this bad boy has it all. There's really not a good reason in my mind to review the other commercial piece (jot.com) except to trash it and save you the reader some troubles. EditGrid is amazing, uploaded an xls file with a couple thousand rows. Formatting - retained! Multiple tables in a spreadsheet? No Problem! EditGrid has it all. This is a straight up killer ap. Posted the entire city of Charlottesville line-item budget and voila! Up in a few minutes. Not surprisingly this cite is getting hit hard at the mooment, expect some delays while their netadmins deal with the reality of being excellent.

Jot.com (now google's love child, and prolly soon to move towards non-suck is a nice application that bites bytes). It's being revamped right now, this "lucky" author got to check it out pre-google, so there's no telling what the new release will do, check back in a few months, it's google, and it's bound to get better with some resources. So far however.... nothin' werked, as they say. Cut'n'Paste your spreadsheet and watch your computer crash and burn. No format retention and formulas don't work. This thing sucks


wikicalc : Dan Brinklin worked his way in to the geek hall of fame with visicalc almost 20 years ago. His new spreadsheet wikicalc is open source gpl, and so it gets some big points for that. Indeed with a decent server this may be a killer ap. It also has some decent cut'n'paste features, however it flakes out pretty hard on a serious data load. On the plus side it retains some formulas and can do formatting - WAY BETTER THAN JOT.COM and free open source! Even its alpha release is more inspiring than the jot.com crud.