JotBlog

Wikis are helping to alleviate the pain associated with collaborating on a Word document over email. But what about collaborative spreadsheets? In particular, “tracking” spreadsheets.

What’s a tracking spreadsheet you ask? A tracking spreadsheet is something non-technical people create to, well, track things - product features, recruiting candidates, sales targets, wedding planning tasks and employee information, etc. Excel is supposed to be an amazingly powerful financial tool and yet 80% of the time we’re just creating simple lists of stuff.

So, what’s the problem?

First, because these spreadsheets are typically sent out over email, participants can never keep track of the latest version. Making and merging changes is challenging - do I put them in an email or change the file and send it back? The poor “spreadsheet wrangler” spends an inordinate amount of time updating the file with everyone’s changes.

The second problem is that Excel only handles information that fits in cells. If this “tracking spreadsheet” is supposed to help me keep track of business deals that my team and I are working on, what about all the out-of-band information that doesn’t fit in cells but that is related? Where do I put the contracts we’re sending back and forth? How do I find relevant emails on any particular deal or include links with real-time news about any of the companies I’m working with? A tracking spreadsheet is supposed to be a centralized dashboard of information, but in Excel you can only track things that fit in cells.

We thought there might be an interesting way to solve the problem of collaborating on tracking spreadsheets over email by combining the convenience of Excel with the collaborative power of wikis. If this sounds interesting and the problem resonates with you, head on over to tracker.jot.com and sign up. We’re going to be launching a new product soon and we’d like to offer you a sneak peek in a few weeks when it’s ready.