Climb Into Your Spreadsheet Avatar

At some point we’ve all wished for a smarter, faster, better looking version of ourselves. Jake Sully in the movie Avatar goes from paraplegic to 10 foot tall blue humanoid with carbon fiber-laced bones. His consciousness is networked inside the new body that in form and function is oriented like his old body, only way better. Similarly, you can now network your Spreadsheet inside a Smartsheet and morph it from number cruncher to a bigger better version of itself capable of managing all kinds of work in ways not before possible.

Those of us who use spreadsheets to track and manage work have similarly wished for enhancements to that indispensible application. We want it to provide better automation, coordination, historical memory and to coordinate our files. Excel-meets-Project-meets-SharePoint. While Microsoft’s Excel will remain the next decade’s super-human financial analysis and number crunching tool, and Project will remain a tool for complex projects, neither is well suited to general work management for the rest of us.

On the fictional planet Pandora, humans must don masks to operate in its atmosphere. Google, Zoho and others have brought Office applications to the Internet masked with features that help them thrive in the Internet’s ubiquity. But, while the apps can move around nicely on the net, they are still the human versions of their earthly counterparts. Transferring desktop-designed technology to the internet doesn’t make it that much more useful.

An evolutionary work management tool fuses the best of all the individual tools into one coordinated application. It may resemble the spreadsheet you typically use for work management, but its carbon-fiber bones are powerful collaboration and work automation capabilities rather than the expected math and analysis features.

The online versions of project tools and spreadsheets are certainly converging toward some of the blended features that make Smartsheet unique. This chart shows how the desktop versions of Microsoft’s tools and the online versions of their competitors are evolving.

A Smartsheet enables you to:

• Attach Files and Links to any row in the sheet
• Create Discussion threads on any row in the sheet
• Send specific rows to anyone via email and ask them to update particular fields
• View the work in Calendar or Gantt form
• Create a hierarchy within your list of items
• Set Alerts and Notification on any row that keep you abreast of changes happening
• Access summary views of work across sheets even when they are structured in totally different ways

Teams within large companies and leaders of small businesses both find Smartsheet to be a low cost, easy to implement alternative to SharePoint, MS Project and MS CRM.

And, just as Jake’s new Na’vi body can network with the living things around it, Smartsheet can network with the other software tools you use and incorporate them into your spreadsheet format.

• Sign in via your Google or Intuit Workplace Account
• Attach any Google Doc to any row or sheet
• Import and export information to Google Spreadsheets
• Import information from Quickbooks
• Open Office documents as a Google Doc
• Crowdsource your task-oriented work to an on-demand workforce in the cloud with Smartsourcing

Smartsheet works in harmony with Google Apps and Intuit’s QuickBooks.

Companies like Microsoft have been evolving the spreadsheet for decades. The most meaningful advances have been in the sophistication of analytical processing. Smartsheet is the first major advance in spreadsheets toward the other primary use – general work management. Enjoy your new 10 foot tall body.

- Brent Frei