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It’s not a stretch to imagine that a day without spreadsheets might be more catastrophic to the global economy than a day without all other business applications combined. Take them away and the working world would all but screech to a halt. Other than email, the absence of no other application would have such a dramatic impact.
We can all attest to the continued growth in use and importance of spreadsheets for just about every kind of work, despite the creation of so many purpose-built tools by vendors who want to take us away from them. This staying power, combined with unparalleled flexibility, a standard file format, decades of shared files, and a 1 billion user base, makes the spreadsheet an ideal foundation to build upon for the next-generation of collaborative work.
Of course, it didn’t start this way. VisiCalc, the first commercial spreadsheet launched on October 17th 1979, was designed solely for numerical modeling — more specifically, accounting. It was quickly adopted for both personal and business use, and hailed by Steve Jobs as critical to Apple’s success:
“There have been two real explosions that have propelled the [PC] industry forward. The first one … was the spreadsheet … VisiCalc. And that’s what really drove — propelled — the Apple II to the success it achieved.”¹
- Steve Jobs, 1996
Over the decades spreadsheets have behaved true to their name and spread far and wide, for much more than just numerical modeling. Today we use them for managing work in just about every function of every organization, in every industry. Every company has a spreadsheet fabric. From tracking and sharing lists of information, to managing projects and tasks, customers and contacts, workflows and business processes, inventory and assets, quotes and invoices, and much more. Their speed, power, ease of use, and unmatched flexibility have led them to be used far more than even today’s most successful enterprise applications.²
According to Microsoft³:
“Excel is the #1 tool for making sense of data in the world today.”
Data analytics has always been Microsoft’s primary focus for Excel. The same applies to Google Sheets, and for good reason:
“… the world of data is evolving so rapidly… 90% of the world’s data was created in the last two years, and the demand for understanding data is increasing across all different industries … but our brains and our skills aren’t necessarily expanding at the same rate.”
While the world clearly needs spreadsheet vendors that are focused on analytics, it is precisely this focus that has created so many opportunities for the unbundling of spreadsheets. Beyond analytics and numerical modeling, spreadsheets are used for managing all kinds of collaborative work that they were never designed for.
This has led to the creation of a whole category of software called Collaborative Work Management (CWM), with vendors such as Smartsheet, Airtable, Asana, Monday.com and many others fueled by significant venture capital funding and $1B+ valuations. The primary user adoption flow for these CWM products consists of moving people away from spreadsheets to their proprietary platforms.
While many of these products are seeing success, none of them is an actual spreadsheet.⁴ This means that moving away from spreadsheets to any of these products requires users to sacrifice most of the familiarity, flexibility, and function of the spreadsheets they are coming from in order to gain new capabilities. The level of sacrifice varies by product, but we think this is a major disservice to users.
Rather than improving collaborative work with tools that replace spreadsheets, we believe the world needs a more capable spreadsheet for collaborative work.
That’s why Spreadsheet.com was designed from the ground up as an actual spreadsheet, maintaining the simplicity and flexibility of traditional spreadsheets, while introducing a whole new set of features that give it the power of an easy-to-use database and project management system, all with real-time updates and messaging. And because the foundation of Spreadsheet.com is a standards-compliant spreadsheet, users can import existing spreadsheets as XLS and XLSX files without loss of worksheet data, styling, formatting, and formulas⁵.
We like to say that Spreadsheet.com makes spreadsheets come alive as applications.
To accomplish this, Spreadsheet.com contains many new capabilities that do not exist in traditional spreadsheets, such as:
These are just a few of the unique capabilities in Spreadsheet.com. To learn more about how Spreadsheet.com works, and to see how it’s different from traditional spreadsheets, watch our 4 minute demo video.
Our vision is to empower anyone to quickly and easily create solutions for collaborative work. We think the best way to accomplish this is with a product that leverages how most people already work together. That’s why Spreadsheet.com has the same familiar interface and features that hundreds of millions of spreadsheet users already know — but with a whole new set of database and project management capabilities that go far beyond traditional spreadsheet products.
We believe a more capable spreadsheet for collaborative work will be used as the foundation for one of the next great enterprise software platforms. We believe this future is inevitable and our mission is to be the company that delivers it.
If you’re as excited as we are about the future of collaborative work, we’d love to hear from you. We’re looking for people with a passion for spreadsheets, a healthy penchant for questioning the status quo, and an eagerness for empowering people to create. Contact us at info@spreadsheet.com.
