SocialCalc - a new online spreadsheet

Zoho, Google Spreadsheets, EditGrid ... you have competition!!

Our traditional analytical tools--whether Visicalc, Lotus 1-2-3, Excel, or even Google spreadsheets--have done a great job enabling us to crunch the numbers. But they've made it really really hard to talk about the numbers we were crunching. There's no good way in Excel to explain where the figure in Cell I-57 came from. There's no good way to ask whether the growth projection in Y-163 feels reasonable to the rest of the team.

What a concept...talk about the numbers. If you've done a lot of modeling, you know that the hard part isn't the mechanics of the model; it's the reasonableness and consistency of the assumptions, the accuracy of the inputs, and the strength of the modeling logic.

What's different about SocialCalc - and I think it's really fundamental--is that SocialCalc is integrated into a wiki. You can drop a spreadsheet into a wiki page. You can drop wiki text into a spreadsheet. You can link from a spreadsheet to a wiki page that explains where the numbers came from. In short, you can talk about the numbers.

Source: http://michaeli.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/06/lets-talk-about-numbers.html