If you recall Alexaholic (now Statsaholic) you’ll know how mashing-up
images can work like a charm. It provided several input boxes for
submitting domain names, and then load the traffic ranking comparison
charts from Alexa.

With EditGrid’s dynamic image feature, we support users to do something
similar, see the following demo spreadsheets:

* Stockaholic (http://www.editgrid.com/tnc/vincent/Stockaholic.new) -
mashup charts from Yahoo! Finance..
* Weatherholic (http://www.editgrid.com/tnc/vincent/Weatherholic.new) -
mashup satellite images from BBC Weather and t7online.

See the “instructions” tab of the above spreadsheets to know how to do it.
Rolling your own “-aholic.com” is dead simple, but the result works great.

The dynamic image feature is sponsored by LIM (http://www.lim.com/)

The interface is extremely easy and you will be up and running in no-time. You can add text, objects, text objects, images (once you have logged in),

They’re also developing a plug-in architecture so there are plug-ins for Google Maps, Flickr and “Arrow” which lets you add an arrow and rotate it etc in real-time. So it looks promising.

So what doesn’t Thumbstacks do (yet, I would guess!)? Well, there’s no Slide transitions, Animations and Actions, Sounds and Video or Drawing Tools.

Well, to be honest – the presentations you product with Thumbstacks become quite boring but this service is great if you quickly want to share a presentations with someone or a group and at the same time have an online meeting over the phone. Much easier than e-mailing a Powerpoint slide and let everyone try to follow you. But this area of web 2.0-tools will definitely be interesting to follow.

Here’s a screencast how the Presentation Builder software works:

Now beta 16 has been released with what they say is “EditGrid’s biggest major release so far, in terms of both time and effort spent, because we are making big changes!“.

The biggest differences are a new portal home page and a tag cloud. You have the possibilty to add a searchbar to Firefox and IE7. If you want to know details, check out their change log.

Thanks to Thomas for the tip.

First, there’s a new way of sharing your files. You can choose whatever mailclient you usually use, such as Gmail and Hotmail (also local clients if you’re still running installed ones ;)). A good thing about this is that you don’t have to maintain a complete list of users in multiple locations – just pick them from your addressbook.

Second, which isn’t really relevant since I’m looking into uninstalling everything from my desktop is that there’s a new version out for the desktop version which more or less is ThinkFree Online, but installed on your PC.

Also, interesting news: ThinkFree announced that it has supplied The City of Los Angeles public library with ThinkFree Server Edition for its Central Library and 71 branch libraries. Can you imagine the cost savings? Instead of locally installing any Office suite on 2,200 desktops, they just maintain a webserver.

Oh, and by the way, did you know you can win some goodies if you recommend ThinkFree for someone, or if you tell them of a successful story when using it?

To get all the features, you need to use the application based on Java (JVM) so the first time it loads it will take some time but after that – the applications is cached. But it can take up to 30 seconds before a documents open that you want to edit. Once loaded – it’s fast though!

When you startup each application you’ll be amazed how close to Microsoft Office it looks.

Check out the following screencasts so see it live.

You have My Office which contains all your files. Here you can create additional folders which you also can share or publish. You can upload, edit your current documents or share/publish them individually. You can also easily search your own documents.

Here’s a demo of the wordprocessor application:

Here’s a demo of the spreadsheet application:

Here’s a demo of the presentation application:

I’m quite sceptical to using the Java editor. I’ve experienced many problems with Java apps during the years I’ve used them – but that’s just my personal view! You have the Quickedit-mode which is not as powerful but still useful!

• An EditGrid Finder (for searching content on all public readable books or your owned books)
• Export PDF
• Text overflow
• OpenDocument (.sxc) format support

Check out my complete review of EditGrid including thoughts and screenshots.

You have a lot of different charts you can create. There are somewhat 40 ways to present your charts and diagrams and there are ~20 functions like AND, OR, NOT etc. You can style the text, fonts and cells in whatever way you like. There are advanced number formatting like Number, Date, Time etc.

You can do import/export from common formats such as CSV, OpenOffice, Excel etc. You can also insert remote data live – today Stock Quote, Currency Exchange and Web Data is available but I guess more sources will be developed. You can share your spreadsheets to anyone, to specific users or simply with a password.

The interface and “web 2.0″-features is really impressive. For example, if you create a chart in your diagram you can drag it around in your diagram and data is updated in realtime as you write so if you change data in a cell, the diagram will change in realtime – so usability is high – it’s hard to say that you’re really using a webinterface!

When it comes to the Enterprise it’s good that the application is available in different languagues. You also have an API if you want to use Editgrid in your own application. You also have Version Controlling builtin.

EditGrid has made an Comparison Sheet – of course made with EditGrid. If you want to try it out, check out their ready-to-run templates or run a Quickstart demo.

• You can let anyone view (as long as they have a Google account) without inviting them
• Easier URLs for your spreadsheets to share
• Get list of people to invite from Gmail/Google Calendar
• Print feature
• PDF Export
• Open Document Format support (ODF)
• Format cells using more currency symbols and additional formats
• More lines of text in each cells
• Merge Cells now on multiple rows at one once
• Larger file sizes imported
• New Function Dialogbox and help page
• Un-saved spreadsheet warning

I really like Google Spreadsheets but before they become the leader in Web Spreadsheets applications they have to make sure we get the feature to create charts and diagrams.

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