Hi My team need to share the editing of a spreadsheet. Can you recommend any free online tools? - We dont like Google docs because we have ideological objections to Google - DropBox seems trixy to use (setup difficulties) With thanks J
Dayvo - I'm a bit confused by all that. We are looking for a free tool that is already hosted for us (whereas from what I can see we would need to install dhtmlxSpreadsheet on a PHP server, ourselves, yes?)
Yes that's correct, I should have added that the above is a self hosted method. Apologies if that was not what you were after
teamlab zimbra zoho but honestly, if at all possible, putting ideological objections aside, Google Docs is the best solution available.
From what I can see Teamlab and Zimbra are free. We have just started trialing Zoho which gives 5GB for free and has "9 million users". Looks v promising so far. In what way is it inferior to the hated Google's Docs? EDIT: There is a catch. Free version of Zoho only allows 3 collaborators. We need at least 10. And it's a full $60/year just to host a small spreadsheet for a few month shared by a few of us. Zoho are idiots. It should be $5 one-off maximum not $5/month indefinitely. Damn - that's a deal-breaker for us. Any other suggestions? (e.g. Free collaboration tools... ?)
CORRECTION: TeamLab is NOT free, it is $75/year for 5 and a full $250 for up to 10 users (nightmare!) Zimbra seems to be something we need to host on a server, whereas we need something hosted.
This might seem obvious, but have you tried SkyDrive? It's Microsoft's own service, it's free and it lets you edit documents collaboratively, just like Google Docs (even somewhat better). Just sign in to SkyDrive, upload your file, share it (with anyone or only your team) and anyone can view and edit it.
On reflection we do not want to use any of: Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple or Amazon because we believe that they are not only assiduously collecting what is effectively Evil amounts of data about all of us, but they are also bankrupting smaller companies with anti-competitive practices.
Well, that's a tough one then... The only other good collaborative writing tools I know are Trello (which is more of a task management tool) and Draft (at Draftin.com) - it's a great collaborative document editor with version control aimed at writers, but last time I checked they did not have spreadsheet support - you could give it a go and see if you like it, though...
In the early 20th century the Belgium state forced all citizens to register over 100 things about themselves. This seems like a good idea at the time. In order to plan burial ground efficiently this included "religion". When Adolf Hitler took power in the 1940s for anyone who had ticked the wrong box, they themselves, their children, their cousins in fact their entire families were murdered. We all need to learn from history. But Asash47 clearly you have never lived under a totalitarian police state. As the wise man said: "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that they aren't after you" Sure, I'll happily take my "anti-paranoia" pill if you take your "anti-naivety" pill.
Editgrid is something you'd like: http://www.editgrid.com/ (No affiliations to it) Though, they're closing down come May. You can use them till then.
I admire standing by your beliefs regarding the use of vendors you feel harm others and thus exhaustively seeking (almost painfully) friendlier alternatives. I may have a solution for you. This is actually funny, I haven't logged into my account for this provider for approx 2,000+ days. I saw your post and after a bit of thought remembered using CentralDesktop long ago. So, I looked up my old user/pass, went to the site and my free account was still good. I haven't dealt with them recently but when I used them regularly years ago I remember how responsive they were when I called with a few tech questions. They even called me back (free account) weeks later to make sure everything was going well for me, wasn't a sales call. I was impressed! Anyway, CentralDesktop is a good project/ team collaboration system (yes, server-side hosted). You can create or upload a spreadsheet which you and your team can collectively access. You mentioned having 10 team members so I'm not sure the free plan (not "free trial") will work. The free plan is described on their site as: free plan for small teams (5 users, 2 workspaces, 1GB file storage). The link is on their pricing page, under paid product descriptions & pricing table. I just spent a few minutes getting reacquainted with the site and it is robust yet simple. I don't know.....if you have 10 people maybe you can find a way to create two free accounts.?.? The next step up is an account (free trial) with up to 30 users and costs $99 a month. I can see where that could be well worth it...you can basically keep track of everything across your business/ associates with it. Check it out if you are still looking for something. I hope you find a solution that works for you and, again, kudos for standing strong! BTW - the site is centraldesktopdotcom [ I'm not sure if you can post links in this forum...I haven't been here in a while either
Then I suggest you go local and search for those small companies who provide you with the tools you want to use. Then again, management of spreadsheets will be managed by your networking software (locking / protecting opened files). As you most likely will not find any of those local services (because surprisingly that stuff costs money to develop), I suggest submitting a request on a website like odesk to programm a solution for sharing; there are tools available for editing spreadsheets online However those usually only deal with simple spreadsheet files, if you need more complicated solutions, this will take more work.