I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around what it means to combine a spreadsheet with a wiki. Yesterday, Google announced a new feature on Google Spreadsheets called “anyone can edit”. Create a model, pop it up on the web, and let people start editing… even anonymously.
Crowd-sourcing complex formulae? Fact checking numbers?
What am I missing? What are the user scenarios for mass collaboration on a spreadsheet?
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
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Accounting anarchy. Imagine that.
Collaborative business planning, as long as there is a changelog with some basic version control.
wiki-leaks style collaborative analysis of records.
Anything that you would collaborate on but you need to do some math. How about collaborative analysis of government budgets?
There isn’t a mess as long as there is some version control, at least no more than Wikipedia is.
I can totally get it.
Especially if you are collaborating with people and you don’t have a centralized data location. Emailing spreadsheets is just mean. I’ve had 3 project managers working on tracking capital spend, and the flurry of emailed spreadsheets can even make outlook shudder in fear.
I totally get it too. It allows you to collaborate with others without them having to have a Google account. You don't post the URL on a website unless you want total chaos. You email or IM it only to the people you want to collaborate with.