When was the last time you used a spreadsheet? What did you use? Did you go for the traditional client office application suite, whether it be Microsoft Office System, OpenOffice, or even OpenOffice portable (which is rather interesting), or an online solution like Google Docs, or EditGrid? Aside from the plentitude of feature difference, the core functionality is very similar, so how do you decide what to use? ...
There are of course many answers to this question, however lets look at one particular aspect - shared document scenarios. The scenario is that you and a few colleagues need to track some numbers in a spreadsheet. You all need to make changes and view updates to the data. So what do you do? You can't just put a copy onto your document management system because you need to be able to make changes concurrently.
There are two solutions I'll discuss. Firstly you could create the document online using EditGrid (or Google docs, or your other favourite online spreadsheet). Then ask your colleagues to create accounts for themselves, sort out permissioning, get everyone to log in and view the document, and voila! You're ready to collaborate on the spreadsheet. Once you are set up the collaboration experience is very good, changes are made and your document is updated to reflect the latest state. The downsides with this system are a) you and your colleagues need to set up accounts with the service provider, b) the data resides on an external server (which might not be ideal if its sensitive data), c) you will have to be concerned about file format fidelity (i.e. when I export the data will it be compatible with the other spreadsheet solutions used in my organization), and d) offline scenarios are not handled well.
An alternative solution might be to set up a regular network share with write permissions given to your colleagues, then use Microsoft Excel to create a plain workbook on the share. Now all you have to do is turn on shared workbooks and you're done. This nifty feature of Microsoft Excel allows you to have multiple users editing the file simultaneously and have changes propagate around every time a save operation is performed.
If anything is for sure, it's that you now have many more choices than ever before. And its not just spreadsheets - take a look at Snipshot for example, which does online photo editing. So what's next?
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Duncan Bayne | Fri, 2008-01-25 17:55
Interesting article - I myself make extensive use of Google Docs to handle timesheets when I'm contracting or consulting. I then export the timesheets to Excel format (that's what my payrolling company uses) & email them.
I guess there are two primary issues people are trying to solve by using shared online document management: collaboration and workflow.
For collaboration, all of the solutions you proposed work fine - which one you pick will depend upon your specific requirements. I'd suggest two more possibilities: a Wiki for text documents, and source control if you're working with people used to it (i.e. developers).
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