• April 7, 2008

eXpresso Helps Communities in Action

Here at eXpresso we talk a lot about our “Spreadsheet Communities,” or “Business Communities.” After all, we are dedicated to enabling interaction between groups of people who have a common goal. The communities we deal with are typically virtual, coworkers and partners spread out across the globe. However, I recently had a discussion with a user about a different kind of community. An actual community. A neighborhood.

Sarah is a member of the Our Town Our Park Steering Committee in Anacortes, WA. This project is a community based effort to build an extraordinary playground and gathering space. The play area will be built entirely with donated funds, materials, tools and labor–all raised from local businesses, civic groups, individuals and grants. This is a truly meaningful project and support has been exceptional.

Sarah and her team have been using eXpresso to share project schedules and budgets. She told us,

“eXpresso has been a great help to our project and seems perfectly tailored for community groups like ours with limited infrastructure and varying degrees of comfort with software and spreadsheets. We really needed a way to share files as it was tedious to create and maintain our construction budget and volunteer database. I was thrilled when I found your product. None of the other options were even remotely as user friendly and required a much more complicated setup and hosting on a domain. The Excel add-in is great, providing full functionality to power users of Excel and a familiar interface for those with limited spreadsheet exposure.”

Thanks Sarah! It is nice to be reminded that in this Web 2.0 world, children need a place to play … outside… physically …. in real time. (They are still a little short of their fundraising goal, so feel free to donate. Every little bit helps.)

• By Amber