Where is the Excel community?

Excel is one of the most used software applications in the world. There is, therefore, a lot of know-how, tips, and tricks out there about Excel. There are many Excel experts, MVPs, consultants, add-in manufacturers – you name it. So why is there no Excel community? Where can we Excelists meet, talk, and exchange ideas? Where is the Microsoft sponsorship that should support this?

In any case, the guys from the Excel user conference are the only ones who make an effort. I didn’t get a chance to attend their conference, but they do have some big Excel experts as lecturers, and they seem to be having fun. I hope to attend sometime during 2007, but if you get a chance to attend before I do, please tell me how it was.

Collaboration scenario: updating the contacts list

You probably have noticed that I find the concept of spreadsheet collaboration fascinating. Well (surprise, surprise), here is another post on collaboration.

The simplest collaboration process I can think of is a task that plagues almost every secretary in the world: updating the office’s contacts list.

Let’s see how this task is performed today:

  1. Using an Excel template, secretary prepares contacts list.
  2. Contacts list is sent to employees by e-mail. Each employee is requested to fill in his or her details and send it back to secretary.
  3. Request is ignored by everyone.
  4. Secretary nags employees for two months. Finally gets details from everyone.
  5. Since it’s been two months since secretary started collecting details, they need updating again. Begin again at step 1.

In my ideal world of spreadsheet collaboration, the same process would happen like this:

  1. Secretary logs in to collaboration-enabled, Web-based contacts list spreadsheet (CEWBCLS).
  2. Secretary updates list of office personnel and presses automatic update button.
  3. CEWBCLS sends an e-mail to each employee requesting him to log on to CEWBCLS and update his own details.
  4. CEWCBLS nags those employees that do not comply with the original e-mail and keeps reminding them (gently but firmly) of their obligations until they update their entry in the contacts list.
  5. CEWCBL sends daily progress reports to secretary.

Cogniview is now a certified partner of Microsoft

I am pleased to announce that Cogniview has achieved the rank of Microsoft certified partner. We were always putting off becoming a certified partner because it seemed to be a big hassle. We were right about that. We had, however, an ace in the hole that I wasn’t aware of: you, the customers.

Our customers deserve the credit for our becoming a certified partner. It seems that if you have a product that is used by thousands of customers, you just fly through the product-certification tests (we submitted our PDF-to-Excel conversion product).

The best part was the testimonials. As an ISV, you are required to submit customer testimonials to Microsoft and have the customers who gave those testimonials approve them. It took us just three hours to get approval for our testimonials. The speed with which the approval came moved me.

Thank you, dear customers.

Here are a couple of pictures of the gang and PDF2XL with the goodies that you get from Microsoft.

The Gang with the Microsoft flag

PDF2XL and the ISV competency plaque

What is spreadsheet collaboration?

Writing the previous post about collaboration got me thinking about the concept of collaboration. I came to see that collaboration (and spreadsheet collaboration in particular) is not easy to define.

The wikipedia definition of collaboration is “all processes wherein people work together”. But does that mean that Google’s definition of collaboration is the best one? Does collaboration have to be simultanous work on the same spreadsheet or can it also be a group of people working in a non synchronized way to complete a spreadsheet-based task.

Is collaboration important in the design phase of the spreadsheet, when the structure of the tables, graphs, and charts is prepared, or in the data-entry phase?

Is chat a good enough medium to support collaboration or does a collaboration-enabled spreadsheet need an interface to VoIP software?

Should collaboration be a fully democratic process, in which everyone has an equal voice and equal authorization to edit every aspect of the spreadsheet-or should it be a moderated process, in which the spreadsheet owner can control both the right to speak and the extent to which collaborators can modify the spreadsheet?

Excel Tip – Transposing a table

I didn’t initially intend to post tips, but the other day Jan Karel Pieterse from Daily Dose of Excel wrote an excellent post on how to transpose a table while keeping the formulas in the table intact. I was actually asked about this by one of our customers, so I thought I should share this with all of you.

Office Competitors and Collaboration

Posting resumes after a week of vacation and another week of the flu. Just before my absence, an article about MS Office Killers was published in Red Herring. The article makes one very good point and misses another.

The first point is collaboration. Before I went away, Ilan (one of our brilliant programmers) and I worked with a Web-site design firm on the layout of one of our Web pages. Initially, the firm wanted access to our Web-site page source to make the changes on their own. For both security and quality reasons, we were not going to let that happen.

Instead, we collaborated. We fired up our MSN messengers and started working together on the page. Everyone was messaging; Ilan was making the actual changes. The result: a horrible mess! No one could complete a thought, bad changes canceled out good ones, and productivity was nowhere to be found. It took us two and a half hours to do work that could have been done in half an hour.

The Red Herring is right: “Collaboration tools have become critical.” What they missed is the reason why Office competitors will have a hard time, at least when it comes to Excel. It’s not because of Microsoft’s enormous, well-funded marketing machine. It’s not even because of the enormous install base (more than 400 million). It’s because of the special relationship Excel users have with Excel. Excel users are experts; they love Excel and are proud of their knowledge and skill. You’ll have to give Excel users much more than a mere Wiki if you want them to glance at you.