Need to put together a quick list or data table, but can't be bothered with the bloat of a full spreadsheet application?

List² is a minimalist (32kb) application that can do just that. Its uncomplicated interface allows you to quickly assign names to columns and start entering your data.

What can List² do with such a small footprint? Import and export tabbed data files, import CSV, export to HTML, and perform simple search and replace operations. Columns and rows can be moved around and inserted with ease, and List² even supports column sorting.

Though the .zip download contains a .reg file, I was able to extract only the executable itself and run it on my MSI Wind with no trouble at all. With it on my flash drive I've got a tiny, incredibly simple way to maintain lists on the go - regardless of who's computer I'm using.

I've been using Excel for jobs like this for ages, which just doesn't make any sense. List² is much lighter, and does everything I need it to do. It's freeware, Windows only.

Making a point-by-point comparison chart is a pain in the butt. It requires fiddling with spreadsheets, formatting lots of individuals cells and hoping the results are easy to read. Tablefy takes all the mess out of comparing things. Just put in your data and it'll do the rest. You can even embed pictures and YouTube videos with little fuss.

The example charts look sharp and professional, and there are some neat little auto-formatting quirks that save you time. If you're doing a comparison that uses a lot of "yes" and "no" -- a feature comparison between two apps, for example -- Tablefy will automatically color the yes and no cells for you, making them easier to distinguish. Although the charts are made to be embedded on your own site, there are lots of examples to browse and vote on at the Tablefy site.

[via Webware]

PearBudget is an online budget manager that makes it extraordinarily easy to keep track of your money. The service doesn't link to your bank account, and doesn't import information from Quicken or other desktop accounting software. You actually have to enter your expenses by hand. But this is much, much easier than you'd think.

All you have to do is spend a few minutes when you set up your account entering your typical monthly expenses. And then each time you pay a bill or tally up how much money you spent going out to dinner or a movie, you enter that information. This takes just a moment or two a day, and ensures that you actually think a little bit about how you spend your money every day, which is probably the most useful thing any budget application can do.

PearBudget is not free. There's a 30 day free trial, after which you need to pay $3 per month to use the service, which might seem a bit steep for such simple application. But if you can live without the web interface, there is a free version of PearBudget. The application started its life as a simple but well-organized Excel spreadsheet, which is still available as a free download.

[via Boing Boing]

While Google's online office suite might not have all the features of Microsoft Office, one area where Google's word processor, spreadsheet, calendar, and IM client excel is in letting you easily collaborate with other users. Want to share a Word document or spreadsheet with other users, just click the share button.

But that only works if the people you want to share with have already registered for Google Apps accounts. Now Google has launched a new version of Google Apps that makes it a whole lot easier to get a group of people registered quickly.

Google Apps Team Edition packs all the basic features like Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Google Talk. But when you sign up for Team Edition, Google Apps will automatically recognize your company or school email address and locate other users affiliated with the same organization and add them to your contact list. Now when you want to share a document or send a message, you should have a list of all the other people who have registered for Google Apps with email addresses from the same domain.

For example, if your email address is address@domain.com, you can share documents with any other uses who has a @domain.com address. Alternately, you can choose to share your documents with everyone that has a @domain.com address. While Google Apps Team Edition doesn't offer any features that you can't get with a basic account, the move should help Google grow its user base by making signup much easier.

That said, we've tried to sign up several times today, and we keep getting a server error message from Google. Hopefully that problem will be fixed soon.

Web based office apps are great if you need to collaborate with other people or if you need to access your documents from multiple computers. But sometimes you don't want to fire up your web browser if all you need to do is add a few numbers to your spreadsheet. TechCrunch reports that an answer is just around the corner. And it has nothing to do with Google Docs/Google Gears.

Transmedia is the company behind the Glide Sync application suite that lets you synchronize and edit documents on multiple computers and mobile devices. Tomorrow Transmedia is set to launch Glide Crunch, a spreadsheet app to complement its existing word processor, presentation, calendar, contacts, and e-mail apps. While each of Glide's existing services is web-based, Glide Crunch will be a desktop program that lets you synchronize data with a web spreadsheet application.

While Google Spreadsheet only supports 100,000 cells and up to 40 sheets in a document, Glide Crunch documents can have an unlimited number of sheets and up to 16.7 million cells. Glide provides 2GB of storage for free to customers, while you'll have to pay a monthly fee if you need more space.

Call us silly, but one of the things we've come to expect from spreadsheet applications is accurate math. But a few weeks ago a number of users started reporting that there was a bug in Microsoft Excel 2007 that caused the number 100,000 to pop up any time you entered an equation that should have equaled 65,535 or 65,536. For example, 850 x 77.1 = 100,000.

As it turns out, if you perform other functions on that cell, Excel will spit out the correct numbers. But on-screen it displays the wrong number.

Two weeks later, Microsoft has issued a fix for Excel 2007, and the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Excel Services 2007. The update will eventually be pushed to Excel 2007 users through Windows Update. But if you want to download it now, you can download the appropriate update from Microsoft.

[via Digital Inspiration]

While Google gets a lot of attention every time it launches a new online Office application, and Microsoft earned a few laughs with its announcement of online storage and collaboration features for MS Office, Zoho continues to out-pace the competition.

Zoho's latest accomplishment is a full-featured online database application. Zoho DB lets you create, edit, and share databases. You can organize your data as if it were a spreadsheet, but run queries like you would with a database. There's supports for queries in pretty much any SQL format.

You can create a variety of charts and reports, and you can even embed your database in a web page. If you really want to see what it Zoho DB can do, check out the promotional video after the jump.

Intel is getting ready to debut a closed beta this month of their new mashup tool accessible to non programmers.

The new MashMaker was spotted at the SIGMOD conference in June in a presentation that was prepared by Intel and Yahoo Research. The gist of it was the creation of a tool that made it easy to create mashups from many different sources.

Intel's MashMaker will be a web based tool that makes it easy for normal web users to create mashups from live online data. It will be able to query and combine data that uses an interface that has been inspired by both spreadsheets and web browser. The spreadsheet side will allow for the mixing up of data and editing, while the browser side will allow for navigation to interested content, bookmarking it, and molding it into new widgets.

Just picture simply pulling in information from Google Maps, with Facebook, ebay, Digg and Twitter and creating a complex, yet easy to develop mashup, this is what MashMaker could be like. If it is as easy as Intel and Yahoo made it sound, this has the potential to be a killer application that a lot of people are going to be using to create some crazy mashups.

Could this online office suite steal people away from the popular Google and Zoho? It seems far from likely that Peepel will ever take market share away from the online office application space. However, they might look a little amateur, but a lot of development work has gong under the Peepel hood, showing how serious people are indeed trying to get into this space.

Peepel has just announced their beta release for their online office suite of products that are currently not running head to head with Google, Zoho and Thinkfree. Peepel's suite includes a spreadsheet, calculator, word processor, help system, and a file manager. The Peepel workspace manager is a feature that saves the desktop as you have left it, and will open with everything where you were when you login the next time. A Task manager lives on the screen and shows everything that is open and active. In Peepel, users can have many different applications and files open at once, all overlapping in resizable windows. The big claim to fame by Peepel is the claim that they are the only competitor offering a true multiple window system in an online desktop, and not just a bunch of stacked popups. Some neat features, but nothing out of the ordinary that is going to make users want to switch.

Aside from the fact that there is currently no importing or sharing files, as well as limited storage sizes, Peepel does have a very welcome offline work mode. It's not up to standards with their competition, but if they are serious about success, they do have potential to grab a tiny share of the market space. We will hold off on storing any major files here yet, but our radar will be following Peepel's further development.

It would be great if Google had one single location where every service they are offered was centralized, and it appears they're working on one.

After wondering why Google had purchased Jotspot some time ago, GuillaumeB and Google Operating system among others have come to the conclusion that JotSpot could be the start of a home for all of Google's applications and our documents; "The GDrive".

Currently with Jotspot, users can store, share and edit spreadsheets, calendars, files and photos, to-do lists, email lists, and track projects with a project manager. So, in reality it's not that far off from a possible centralized Google GDrive storage area where users could store all of their Google specific spreadsheets, documents, forums, blogs, mail, calendar, and photo galleries in a wiki type format. Could we finally see the GDrive released this year?

Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch caught what could be evidence that Microsoft is prepping some sort of online spreadsheet program, which would probably be a stripped down version of Excel.

Microsoft Developer Tod Hilton posted on his personal blog that he's moving from Microsoft's Global Foundation Services to the company's Excel Services team. And yesterday, he wrote that the product "has tons of potential and will probably be competing with the likes of Google Spreadsheets, DabbleDB, Zoho, and JotSpot Tracker."

A short while later, Hilton removed that text and updates his post to say that he was removing his "personal opinions." The implication is that we shouldn't read too much into what he wrote on the post, it may have just been excitement about moving to a new team. Either Microsoft is planning on developing an online spreadsheet application, or Hilton really thinks they should and wrote his post in a moment of blind enthusiasm.

Obviously there's not enough information here to determine whether Microsoft is developing online versions of other Office programs such as Word or PowerPoint. But one can dream. While we're dreaming, let's imagine that these applications would all be free.

It looks like Microsoft could have finally realized that the future of software is all about online applications. Microsoft has said that they might be considering launching an online free, ad supported version of its software. The software it might be planning on integrating for online usage is Microsoft Works, which retails for $50 currently. Works has a calendar, spreadsheet, web browser, and email. It is currently a pretty basic home use software package, but at least Microsoft is stepping into the new software generation, and thinking about providing it for free online use.

I got an email this morning from ThinkFree Online (office suite) detailing the new features therein. On the off chance that you didn't get the same email (or spam-filtered it) here is the scoop: Quick edit is a new feature to compliment "Power Edit", meant more for drive-by writing than the whole 7-course meal, also easier blogging features are built right in now. ThinkFree office also is now available for download in the Server 1.1 version, in addition to the web-based and desktop clients. ThinkFree is also holding an iPod contest, for those who explain how ThinkFree has helped their business. These new features have made ThinkFree better since we last saw it here on Download Squad.

In this world filled recently with online spreadsheet and calendar applications, one enters the mix by making things difficult and a little complicated at first, but easier to get the hang of as time goes by.

Dabble DB is free for a 30 day trial [with prices ranging from $10 to $150 month for corporate users]. It enables users to import their spreadsheets, contacts, and databases, as well as start from a fresh sheet. Data in the spreadsheets and documents can then be shared, and collaboration can be turned on by inviting contacts to edit the information. It's a little tricky to get things started from scratch, but after a while it tends to get better. But wait, should online applications be difficult to use at first? Especially when there are tons of them on the market? No. They have to be simple, and very quick to get your information up and running. I still don't have a good handle on Dabble DB after an hour of fooling around with the tool. I will try it out for a little while longer over my one month free trial, and let you know if I change my mind.

Dabble db is cool, but I think I will stick to my Google Calendar, and Google Spreadsheet. Which are free to use, and integrate nicely with my other applications.

Look after the jump for some screenshots of Dabble DB.

The Video Issue. In this issue we cover:

• Google Demo Reel
• Google Click Fraud: The Movie
• The Secret of Google's Search Engine
• Google's First TV ad
• Vint Cerf on Net Neutrality
• Google is looking for a Chef in Chelsea
• What News sources does Google index?
• Picasa Web Albums
• Gpokr