Doug Ross @ Journal

Putting Excel Spreadsheets on the Web

Have been working on BadBlue's Excel web spreadsheet sharing features, enhancing them for a technology firm that's using the product heavily.

I guess there's a problem with spreadsheets. Information gets locked into a spreadsheet on a desktop and there's no easy way to disseminate or share the data. Yet you'd be amazed how many critical business processes -- at some surprisingly large companies -- depend upon a lowly spreadsheets maintained on a user's desktop.

For many companies, replacing a spreadsheet with a real web application is a daunting problem: first of all, users are conceptually familiar with the spreadsheet paradigm and don't like to change. Secondly, it's tough to rustle up enough budget to replace ubiquitous spreadsheets when other pressing concerns are out there (say, hackers crawling through the firewall or that big ERP conversion that's taking four times as long as estimated).

The BadBlue product is designed to take most of the nastiness and complexity out of the picture. It comes complete with its own web server, hardened over years of hacker-testing. And, if necessary, it can run on Microsoft's IIS web server, with Apache support on the way.

You mark a spreadsheet as shared, defined some users, password-protect the file, and you're ready to go.

In less than a couple of minutes, you should have a spreadsheet ready to be shared on your LAN or, if you've installed it on an externally accessible system (e.g., via a router), you can have your colleagues reviewing it and updating it.

Here's the cool part: you can restrict what users can see and do. Don't want a clerk to see that sensitive "true cost" column? Read-protect it for that user - they'll never know the difference. Want your accountant to be able to comment on certain items, but not update any of your figures? You've got it. With audit logging and multi-user conflict resolution built-in, there's a fair amount of security tie-in that can help with Sarbanes-Oxley and other compliance processes that cause baldness in IT managers.

The major new stuff that's been added: a "find" feature (e.g., go to the bottom-most row so you can start doing data-entry... or find that company by name at row 7000). Also, an "insert row" feature to start pushing in additional data without messing your summaries at the bottom.

In addition to that, we'll be supporting a hosting option for spreadsheets, where for a reasonable fee you can have your spreadsheet hosted, multiple users set up to update it, and so on. Email me if you'd like more info on this.

Anyhow, if you're living with spreadsheets, check it out. It might save you some time and energy... and let you deal with that ERP implementation that's got you chewing Minoxidil tablets like they're M&M's.

BadBlue Excel web sharing