Collaboration Spreadsheet

Added by Larry Talley, last edited by Jonathan Nolen on Jan 05, 2006  (view change)

I just read Dan Bricklin's About WikiCalc 0.1 and even though I haven't taken a look at the demo, I am very intrigued.  Especially because I was lead to the Bricklin post by a later article that promises even more attractive capabilities.  But I know how good Confluence is for text, particularly (in my use cases) for significant amounts of text with significant information structure.  I certainly don't expect any 0.1 product to dislodge Confluence in my affections. However, a spreadsheet plug-in for Confluence would be very cool.

Use cases I envision would include:

  • A project web site with the bulk of project documentation organized through native Confluence, but, many specific pages (the budget page, projected usage statistics, quantitative business plan) would include chunks of content controlled by the spreadsheet plug-in.
  • Non-profits web sites with their text postings organized through native Confluence but their budget, business plan, expense reports, etc. controlled by the spreadsheet plug-in.
  • Quick and dirty mechanism to publish and maintain simple block diagrams as content on a Confluence site (using spreadsheet cells as graphical elements).

There may already be plug-ins that do this, if so I apologize to anyone who's generous contribution may have been slighted....

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  1. Jan 05, 2006

    Jonathan Nolen says:

    This is not really a full solution, but we do that the Excel plugin

    This is not really a full solution, but we do that the Excel plugin, that allows you to use Excel spreadsheets to feed Confluence pages. And the Chart plugin, which will make pretty charts out of the data.

    1. Jan 05, 2006

      David Peterson says:

      The Scaffolding Plugin CONFEXT:Scaffolding Plugin can also do calculations, but ...

      The Scaffolding Plugin can also do calculations, but it doesn't have that 'fill-in-the-blanks' quality of a spreadsheet - the page author has to put the blanks there manually, which can then be filled in.

      If anyone wants to write such a plugin, the maths libraries in the Utilities Plugin might come in handy. Scaffolding uses them for it's calculating, and it can be extended with custom functions. I didn't write it, but it does work fairly well, even if it is somewhat confusing to extend...

      1. Jan 05, 2006

        Mike Cannon-Brookes says:

        We have thought about adding basic function capabilities to the table processing...

        We have thought about adding basic function capabilities to the table processing in Confluence a few times, but could never come up with the right balance of 'simple' vs 'useful'.

        Something like if you put =SUM(A1,A3) which would then sum those cells.

        The problems are:

        1. deciding what functions to support
        2. editing - would we need a dedicated table editor as has been discussed before?
        3. cell referencing - right now there is no notion of A1 in a Confluence table (other than conceptual). This could get very confusing for a medium sized table.

        In the end, I think something like improving the remote editing of an attached Excel spreadsheet is going to prove much more useful - but I'd really like to hear from others if they think a few of these basic functions would be useful to add to the markup language (and if so, how!).

        m

  2. Jun 22, 2006

    Larry Talley says:

    I am now in agreement that the remote editing of an attached Excel spreadsheet i...

    I am now in agreement that the remote editing of an attached Excel spreadsheet is probably the most practical solution.  It is a pretty heavy-weight solution, but it should deliver loads of functionality if the author really knows how to use Excel.

  3. Sep 28, 2006

    Stuart Donovan says:

    http://spreadsheets.google.com is great no Safari support yet though. We imbed ...

    http://spreadsheets.google.com is great - no Safari support yet though.

    We imbed links to these from our confluence wiki. It would be nice to have 'sheet' as a Confluence object type so we can stop people using Google for all their information sharing needs. Calendar is another collaboration object that Google is kicking everyone's a$$ on.

    1. Sep 23, 2007

      Eric B. says:

      Forgive the newbieness of the question, but how do you set up your Google docs t...

      Forgive the newbieness of the question, but how do you set up your Google docs to be able to share thru Confluence, but not made as a public document?  How do you share your google docs between multiple users?  Do all users belong to a group or something like that?  How do you manage your google users vs your confluence users?

       Thanks for the advice!  I love the idea of using google docs, but just not sure how to tie them into confluence effectively.

      1. Sep 24, 2007

        Mei Yan Chan says:

        Hi Eric, I'm not particularly sure how this can be done due to my unfamiliarity...

        Hi Eric,

        I'm not particularly sure how this can be done due to my unfamiliarity with Google docs. How about trying to embed the links in the page as suggested in the previous post. Perhaps you would also like to post this question in our forum or mailing list for some guidance.

        Regards,
        Mei