WikiCalc from the creator of VisiCalc

Dan Bricklin has been working hard on his new innovation, WikiCalc, which is an open source mashup of Wikis and spreadsheets. The idea is to have an online spreadsheet that anyone can edit, make changes, and have those changes visible to everyone simultaneously. It allows simple collaboration around a spreadsheet metaphor. Cnet has a story "Spreadsheet whiz tackles wikis" that provides some background.

You may remember Dan Bricklin, who partnered with Bob Frankston, to create VisiCalc, the first PC spreadsheet, long before Lotus 123 or Excel. Dan is a Boston software legend and now spends his time consulting, speaking, and dabbling in open source projects.

For years spreadsheets have been a personal, single user application, even now in the networked world.  People send spreadsheets as attachments via email to multiple people for updates, edits, or review. This creates a huge version control problem where you are never sure  who has the latest copy,  if all updates are reflected, and who made which changes. WikiCalc will solve several of these problems.

Groove Networks created a solution to this problem several years ago in the context of a Groove shared space. It worked well, but required that each user install Groove, join a shared space, and do all their work within that shared space. The problem was that most people work in email or web browsers and it is difficult to get them to collaborate in a separate application.

WikiCalc is just the tip of the iceberg. This metaphor could be extended to any authoring tool or collaboration application. Dan Bricklin may develop more applications, or others in the open source world may innovate on the concept.

Microsoft Office Live will have lots of basic applications for small businesses. This is an area ripe for innovation. The focus will be on simple 80% solutions to everyday problems. The UIs will be intuitive, web based, and collaborative.

TechCrunch has a nice review of "Microsoft Office Live goes into beta"

This is not an online version of Microsoft Office. It is a set of online tools for businesses to help them have a web and email presence at a very low cost (starting at free with ad support). The core tools are a free non-microsoft domain name, website and up to 50 email accounts with 2 GB of storage each.

For a small company needing a informational website, it will be great. Given that the domain name, website building, hosting and email will all be free, this will be very attractive to a small business.

Comments

[Stephane Rodriguez]

A couple clarifications :

- Excel has supported a "shared option across a local network" for a decade (Excel 97 supports it for instance). There are limitations, but this provides users the so-called "new" share feature without going elsewhere.

- the Excel 12 blog guy has made clear when he talked about Excel services (EWA) that it's not a multi-edit tool, i.e. there is no synchronization/merging mechanism, users cannot concurrently edit the shared spreadsheet, and in fact the sharing essentially comes from the sharepoint fs.

- wikicalc supports concurrent edit.

- other products on the web also have similar distinctions.

- perhaps the most puzzling now is how wikicalc and any other offering will be able to make calculations that match those made by Excel, especially when you know the many floating problems, edge cases in Excel, in addition to general floating point calculations. Decision makers should be double careful about that, perhaps more than the fact the web page displays an Excel like grid with all the fancy formatting capabilities.

[Don Dodge]

There are tons of features in Office that no one knows about, or are too hard to use. Sharing of files and spreadsheets is one of those hidden features that is hard for the average user to figure out.

WikiCalc is designed for the "80% case", not the edge case. Excel covers every possible edge case and sophisticated requirement.

Groove has supported "multi-edit", simultaneous update and synchronization of Excel and Word for more than 5 years. But, Groove didn't gain wide spread adoption. Hopefully it will when it is distributed with a new version of Office.

WikiCalc will be a useful tool for quick and simple ad hoc collaboration. Over time it could evolve in lots of different directions. I have a lot of respect for Dan Bricklin. He can do just about anything.

[Suzan Bird]

Look at www.irows.com
It is the best online spreadsheet I have seen

[Zoli Erdos]

I really got excited ... until I saw the "download" link. Download is a very unfriendly term :-(