Excel tables can be embedded in Word documents, but there's a division in Microsoft's Office suite that Quip seeks to forgo with the release of its more social spreadsheets software.
Widely used inside the offices of Facebook and Instagram, Quip's productivity software has been experiencing rapid adoption in its less-than-two years of existence. The software has been installed on the business machines of thousands of companies, according to Quip.
The Quip software suite is available on iOS, Android, Mac OS X and Windows. The suite includes software for documents, chats, lists, and now spreadsheets.
"Quip Spreadsheets exists because people started asking for it almost from the moment we launched," states Quip.
In sticking to the formula of integrated software, the Quip Spreadsheets software was baked into the existing suite as opposed to being released as standalone software. Text, spreadsheets and lists can all live together in one window and on one page.
"We're trying to keep data from being trapped in a single place," said Bret Taylor, Quip's cofounder and the former chief technical officer at Facebook. "Long term, our competitive advantage is that we've thrown out the idea of the stored file."
Quip borrows from popular social conventions to make its spreadsheets software unique among rival applications. Users can drop an "=" and the cell name in a text document to reference a cell in a spreadsheet and use "likes" to show that a team member approves or has at least reviewed changes made to a document.
Quip's productivity suite features full support for importing all of the popular document types, allowing users to migrate those Word and Excel documents into a single workspace.
Taylor places the power of Quip's spreadsheets somewhere between Excel's powerful offering and Google's Sheets, which he says lacks the breadth of features his company's software offers. Taylor says he doesn't expect Quip Spreadsheets to be usurping Excel anytime soon, but he believes there's a strong market for the software among financial analysts.
"If you're an analyst, you can embed the raw data at the bottom of your analysis rather than sending five separate attachments," says Quip. "If you're working on a budget, you can embed full-fidelity financial spreadsheets throughout your document -- no more copying and pasting between Excel and Word to avoid the dysfunctional table support in most word processors. And all of your colleagues can work on the same document at the same time."
While Microsoft's Excel may be safe for now, the need to roll out innovation in its productivity suite shouldn't be lost on the software company.
