wikiCalc beta

More online spreadsheet news: Dan Bricklin has released a beta version of his wikiCalc application. And announced a deal with Ross Mayfield's Socialtext for hosting. And he's gone to some lengths to describe how his product differs from Google Spreadsheets in purpose: wikiCalc assumes that the result should be a normal-looking web page that is perhaps part of a larger website. The reader shouldn't know the page was created with a spreadsheet tool. wikiCalc is more in the class of a blogging tool or a wiki. Many of the other BBSS's assume you want an experience akin to sitting in Excel -- When designing wikiCalc I assumed that many users, and especially some corporate users, will want fine control over the look of the final output.... there is even a way to easily set explicit CSS classes or styles on cells. You can get data from a web service using a simple spreadsheet function and even grab data from regular web pages on other sites. One of the nice things about wikiCalc is that you can download it to host on your own webserver, or to just run locally on your pc for evaluation. You can see a screencast demo explaining wikiCalc on the Socialtext site. Technorati Tags: nptech, wikicalc Photo of Dan demo'ing wikiCalc uploaded to Flicker by BetsyTheDevine.