Online Spreadsheets ??? HowTo

[TerryKing]

There are so many great spreadsheets here. BUT you have to have Microsoft Excel (or open-office on Linux, I think) to run them.

How could we make it easy for anyone to run these online??

One thing that works is to download the .xls file, get a free Google Account, and upload the .xls to Google Spreadsheets. (ONLY for pretty much 'straight' calculations: no graphs etc). But useable for many things.

OR is there any other software that converts an .xls to a live online spreadsheet?

Hopefully there is a great solution I don't know about! What have you seen??

[Crag Cay]

I agree it would be nice to have them live on line, but Open Office Calc is available for windows, is easy to install, opens and saves .xls with all the formatting and charts and is free.

[TerryKing]

Open Office Calc is available for windows, is easy to install, opens and saves .xls with all the formatting and charts and is free.
This is probably the best alternative for those (majority in the poll) running Windows. Can you point to it?? Maybe we could put that in the "Information" sidebar on the Spreadsheet Download section.

I'll try to figure out an easy online way for 'simple' stuff like wiring calculation etc..

[snakefeet]

OpenOffice can be gotten from www.openoffice.org

Another alternative spreadsheet is Gnumeric (see http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/index.shtml ).

I use OpenOffice regularly and think highly of it. In my experience, moving .xls files between OO and Excel has been no problem or, at most, no worse than moving them between different versions of Excel.

I have not yet tried Gnumeric but I hear it has a loyal following and has been ported to Windows.

[nico]

I am using Gnumeric (in Linux), and it's good. Not as good as Excel (2007) but better than Calc (00).
Don't know about the windows version, but i expect it to be similar.

[TerryKing]

OK, here's a quick try... Seems the most full-featured online spreadsheet is editgrid.com which is free and out of beta now. (Google Spreadsheet does not have graphs).. Take a look at:
http://editgrid.com/user/boatdesign
if you're interested. You will see two spreadsheets that you can click on as an anonymous user. The BoatWireSizing one will allow you to change the length of wire and current, and see resulting voltage drop / safety for different wire sizes.

The other is from boatdesign, just a sample because it has an output graph that seems to work OK.

If anyone wants to play with this or add to it, log in to editgrid as boatdesign with password designboat ;)

I think that for any serious design work, someone would want to have Microsoft Excel, or Open Office Calc or Gnumeric installed. But maybe for simpler stuff or examples that can have a simple link in a forum post, this might be OK.

Whatcha Think??

[KnottyBuoyz]

That EditGrid works pretty well for basic spreadsheets.

http://editgrid.com/user/knottybuoyz/summary

Just uploaded the file from Excel '07 and bingo! Easier than exporting from Excel into HTML and uploading as I've done before. Sweet. Thanks for the link.

Rick

[knowme]

EditGrid is really fantastic. Though basic it has all the features I want.