Announcing today – Tables on Acrobat.com Labs. Tables is the most recent addition to Acrobat.com, and joins Presentations and Buzzword. And it’s pretty amazing, if we do say so ourselves. Check it out: http://labs.acrobat.com. And don’t miss the Crash Course. You’ll see what we mean when you open your first table.
Tables tackles the most common use of spreadsheet – working with and sharing information such as project management task lists, budget planning, sales lead pipelines, contact lists and more. Tables has the familiar look and feel of a spreadsheet. It’s optimized for the functions people do using table features in spreadsheets or in simple databases. In a nutshell, shared tables for shared data.
The key problem we spent a lot of time thinking about, designing, re-designing and thinking about some more is this: How do people really want to work together on a spreadsheet?
It’s a tough problem, and there are some simple, elegant solutions included in Tables, which you’ll see in action when you work as a team. The design anticipates how to help people work simultaneously, and how to keep the interactions ‘polite’ when more than one person is working on a worksheet.
• All users can add data simultaneously – solving one of the biggest problems with shared worksheets. All data is always up-to-date for everyone.
• Presence – lets you know who else is working on the table and where they are working
• Private and common views – allows the team to work together, but see the information that is important to each person. Private views let you see information that is important to you, without disturbing others working on the sheet.
• Filtering is real time so you can play with the data and adjust your filter in real time, without having to open a dialog box for every change.
• Sorting – quick, simple and always includes all of the data
Like Presentations, this Preview is on Labs – and clearly, there are more features we want to add. There are some obvious items which will be coming soon – export, print, and more tools for analyzing your data.
Take a look; send us feedback. We need to get back to work now…more good things to come.
Comments
Is there a way to read Acrobat Tables within Flex?
Lisa and Tables team,
You’ve delivered a real gem with Adobe Tables, which absolutely delivers on Adobe’s vision of seamless collaboration and a rich user experience! I’m delighted and can’t wait to leverage the unmistakable and invaluable benefits of Adobe Tables, which is going to completely transform how we share and collaborate on reporting and tracking!
Cheers to Adobe innovation!
Rick Blue
I don’t want to hear about it until you’ve got em available on AIR too!
Seriously though, great job on the whole suite, Buzzword, Presentations and Tables, they are all very slick and elegant applications that hopefully will give Redmond the black eye it needs to whip it into shape. I really would like to see an AIR app for the suite though, since I spend 3 hours+ a day commuting on the train with no WiFi available.
This is a great start to a badly needed product.
By far, most spreadsheets are just used to run lists, and they’re awful at it.
Here’s where I’d like to see this go:
1. Work with .tab and .csv files directly, so you can easily open and save. Don’t know how you keep metadata, but the data itself needs to be easily transportable and that means tab and csv. Separate the data from the display.
2. Built in tool to fix names: separate title, first, middle, last, suffix intelligently and format consistenty.
3. Built in tool to fix addresses: separate address,city,state zip into fields; auto lookup zips. Auto formatting.
4. Distinguish between street and mailing addresses (PO Boxes) and have a way to separate them.
5. Validate email addresses, by structure at least.
6. Find and merge likely dups. User chooses among conflicts and get edit typos on the fly.
7. Desktop version.
You have done a very nice job, a more database looking approach than existing online spreadsheets. It definitely needs Import feature from at least one of popular file formats (.xls, .csv, .mdb, etc.).
These features would be great to add:
- Queries with the ability of joining tables
- Multiple-value data type populated from other tables or fixed defined value list.
Excellent job here! Students already love Acrobat.com and now with tables and Presenter they love it even more. I’ve already had students in using Presenter (so they don’t have to go to the “Comm Lab” on campus and students love that their presentations are cross platform as most of my students use Macs and the rest of the campus are so very PC!
Please please please come up with an import feature for Tables so that we can take the multitude of ExSmell files that we get from Administration, Finance, etc. into the cloud and collaborate on them.
I need to get tables out of a .pdf, ideally in either comma or tab-delimited or Excel format. Is this the application I need?
Response from Arcrobat.com: Tables is an application similar to a spreadsheet or very user friendly database. It will help you to collect, analyze and share information with a group. Unfortunately, PDF is frequently used to snapshot data and is not an interactive format. One thing to try is to copy the data and try to paste it into Tables.