From a reader comes news that EditGrid has launched a private beta for an Excel plugin for offline work on spread­sheets. Pretty cool, as Mashable explains:

As there are several levels of integration, the whole of the integration is rather seamless — it takes no time to load sheets from EditGrid to Excel, and you can work offline if need be and update at a later time.

EditGrid made the announcement on their official blog:

When people think of compat­i­bility across spread­sheet appli­ca­tions, people tend to think of fidelity — whether the spread­sheet file exported from one appli­cation can be imported into another appli­cation without loss of quality or detail. While EditGrid has been doing pretty well in this arena, we are not satisfied with this — exporting spread­sheet data from EditGrid into a file means that the data have become “offline”. It means that the user loses something — the ability to get real-time updated data and collab­orate with each other online — that the user is entitled to on EditGrid.

It’s a huge step on the way to mainstream usage in industry. I didn’t see this coming, but now that I’m aware of it, it seems like such an obvious extension to the previ­ously strictly online app.

Sign up for the private beta and give the future of spread­sheets a whirl.