Quip, the word-processing app built by ex-Facebook CTO Bret Taylor, just added a spreadsheet feature to its work-collaboration software.
The new spreadsheet features are built within the Quip app, so you don’t have to download a separate app to use it. That means you can now create Microsoft Excel-type tables and embed them right into any document you’re working on in Quip. It’s like having Excel in a word processor.
Taylor said the idea to add spreadsheets directly in to his word-processing app came after seeing people grow frustrated going back and forth between Word and Excel just to copy and paste tables.
“There’s no reason Word should have bad tables and Excel should have bad text. It’s a frustrating experience as a user, and it’s something we wanted to fix,” Taylor told Business Insider. “Just like we integrated messaging and documents, we’re now bringing Excel to Quip.”
Like any other Quip feature, the new spreadsheets are focused on work collaboration. You can have a conversation over a specific table cell and have several people edit it at the same time. It already supports over 400 Excel functions, including the math and conditional formulas, and it will soon add graphs.
You can download Quip free for iPad, iPhone, Android, or just head over to the Quip site to give the web version a try.
Here’s a quick walk through of some of its features:
You can add a table into a word document just like that. All texts and spreadsheets can be linked, too.
You can have a real-time conversation over a specific cell, or just use the chat thread on the left side of the document. Multiple users can chat and edit at the same time.
It has over 400 Excel functions and formulas. Graphs aren’t ready yet, but Quip says it's working on it.
The numbers on the document can be referred to the spreadsheet’s cells, so every time you change a number, it will automatically update the entire file.
If you just want to focus on creating a table, you can go in full-screen mode, where it’s just like using Excel.
Here’s a short video of Quip Spreadsheets:
