Juice analytics has a great article that’s making the rounds on in-cell graphing in Excel using simple formulas and the REPT function. Its very similar to the common HTML bargraphing mehod of stretching pixels using javascript to calculate their width. (Pop over there before reading further, since none of this will make sense if you’re unfamiliar with the foundation.) I decided to give the demo spreadsheet a shot in the online spreadsheets I use. Here are the results, for the interested.
Google Spreadsheet Painfully slow to open, easily a minute. PositiveNegative shows NaN in the negative space if there is a positive value. You can fix that by opening any negative field, editing it, and resaving. Dots doesn’t work; spaces are treated as regular HTML white space. This would likely carry over to the Gantt chart, but after a few worksheet changes, G Spreadsheets stops displaying content.
Thinkfree Online The Quick Edit view displays most spreadsheets correctly. Anything using spaces for layout (eg Dots, Gantt), will crap out, since this view is rendered as HTML. The spreadsheet works beautifully in the Java app. Overall, very fast and responsive.
Zoho Sheet Same HTML-related space problems as mentioned above. Column widths came in all screwy, but that wouldn’t be an issue if you were creating your own worksheets.
I have imported the sheet into EditGrid and the result is here:
http://www.editgrid.com/tnc/tony/In_cell_graphing
I removed some rows to make loading faster. It looks quite good~
The link was messed up in my previous post. It should be:
http://www.editgrid.com/tnc/tony/In%20cell%20graphing
Hi, Tony, thanks for responding. When I try to view your spreadsheet, it prompts for login. Is there a way to publicly share the sheet?
I’d never heard of Edit Grid before, it looks interesting. How does it compare against other online spreadsheets?
Hi Andrew,
Oh! I’m sorry that I have forgotten to make the spreadsheet public readable. You should now be able to load it.
Actually EditGrid was publicly available since April this year. I think what EditGrid will distinguish from other online spreadsheet service is that it’s more intended as an online data management platform rather than yet another web offlice. That means rather than an excel clone, it’ll focus on some new ways of manipulating data online. Including posting spreadsheet data to blog, fetching live data from web, allow other programming languages such as PHP/Perl/Python/Java to access the spreadsheet data through its API, and a real-time-update feature that shows the most updated cell values whenever some other people/machine changed it. These are all being quite infeasible in the old days of desktop excel.
It’s quite interesting that some people here (http://www.ogleearth.com/2006/08/turn_online_col.html, http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showflat.php/Cat/0/Number/549532/an/0/page/0) is using EditGrid to store location information, which then feed into Google Map / Earth for displaying a route, without needing to write any piece of code. As EditGrid have real-time-update, whenever someone change the location information in the spreadsheet, the route in Google Map will be updated immediately.
So EditGrid’s doing more than a spreadsheet application.
=)
Tony