SAN JOSE, Calif. – October 17, 2019 – Spreadsheet.com today launched out of stealth and released an early access version of the first standards-compliant spreadsheet platform with easy-to-use database and project management capabilities. With this new offering, Spreadsheet.com has transformed the traditional spreadsheet into a powerful platform anyone can use to build spreadsheets that come alive as collaborative applications.
Announced on the 40th anniversary of VisiCalc, the first commercial spreadsheet released on October 17th 1979, Spreadsheet.com is the only product of its kind that maintains fidelity to the traditional spreadsheet user interface, feature set, and XLS/XLSX file formats. With Spreadsheet.com, more than one billion worldwide spreadsheet users can continue to experience the unparalleled flexibility of spreadsheets while creating powerful new solutions for collaborative work.
The vast majority of workplace spreadsheet usage is comprised of shared lists of information, collaborative project management, workflows, and business processes. Yet Microsoft and Google focus most of their Excel and Sheets development on increasingly powerful analytic capabilities, at the expense of these other broadly entrenched use cases. Recognizing this need, a number of new software vendors have built products to work more like spreadsheets. However, even these spreadsheet-like systems, often categorized as collaborative work management (CWM) platforms, fail to offer the same level of flexibility, familiarity and functional breadth that have made spreadsheets so widely used.
Spreadsheet.com fills this gap by retaining the traditional spreadsheet user interface and feature set while adding a whole new layer of user-friendly capabilities for managing collaborative work. The result is a product with potential to satisfy the massive number of information workers who need better ways to work together yet wish to avoid the added complexity, time, and risk of switching to something that is not an actual spreadsheet.
“Traditional spreadsheets are fantastic tools for data analytics and numerical modeling but are limited in their ability to operate as shared databases and project management systems, which is the way many people use them today,” said Spreadsheet.com CEO Matt Robinson. “We set out to create a better spreadsheet for this kind of collaborative work, with simple-to-use database and project management capabilities, allowing anyone with basic spreadsheet familiarity to quickly and easily create their own solutions that go far beyond what is possible with traditional spreadsheets. Our mission is to build the world’s most accessible platform for collaborative work with workflow, automation, integrations, reporting, dashboarding, and more, without sacrificing the familiarity, flexibility and core spreadsheet features that people already know and rely on for getting work done.”
Making Spreadsheets Come Alive as Collaborative Applications
Collaborative work management (CWM) and project portfolio management (PPM) comprise a nearly $30 billion market. While many of the products in these categories are seeing success, the vast majority of the workforce still relies far more on the flexible and familiar traditional spreadsheet for getting work done.
Spreadsheet.com directly addresses this phenomenon by offering a more capable online spreadsheet for managing collaborative work, enabling users to leverage their years of experience working together in traditional spreadsheets. This gives it viral adoptability characteristics for the portion of this market that values flexibility, simplicity, familiarity and collaboration across broad and diverse groups.
Key features of the cloud-based offering include:
- Familiar spreadsheet interface and core feature set including support for over 400 formula functions with identical syntax to Excel and Google Sheets.
- A rich set of cell data types that go beyond numbers and text, such as ratings, icon sets, collaborators, and attachments that live in cells with drag and drop upload and preview.
- Worksheets that connect together like easy-to-use relational database tables.
- Row hierarchies with parent-child relationships for things like project plans, task lists and org structures.
- New ways to work with worksheet data that go beyond the traditional grid of cells, such as Kanban views for managing workflows and responsibilities.
- Shared views with powerful filtering and sorting criteria to keep people focused on the right information.
- Standards compliant: one-click import of XLS and XLSX files from Excel and Google Sheets without loss of data, styling, formatting and function.
- A growing library of pre-made templates to get started quickly with common use cases such as Agile Project Plan, CRM, Employee Directory, Asset Management, Inventory Management, Applicant Tracking with Hiring Budget, Due Diligence Checklist, and Cap Table with Shareholder Database.
The early access release of Spreadsheet.com is available at www.spreadsheet.com, with general availability expected in early 2020.
About Spreadsheet.com
Spreadsheet.com was founded in October 2017 by the team that built Rollbase, acquired by Progress Software, and Recruitforce.com, acquired by Taleo, now part of Oracle. Serial entrepreneur Matt Robinson and co-founder Murali Mohan have experienced first-hand the limitations of platforms with proprietary user interfaces that require users to learn something new and change the way they work. Spreadsheet.com overcomes these obstacles and improves how people work by giving them a whole new set of capabilities on top of, rather than in place of, the traditional spreadsheet, still one of the most heavily relied on business tools. More information is available at www.spreadsheet.com.
