I received an email recently from Ramesh Sripathy of Zoho, a company I have somehow missed even though they offer a collection of web apps: an online word processor, a CRM app, and a virtual office with tasks, file sharing, calendar, and so on.

Ramesh was responding to the Office? What's An Office? post, where I suggested that someone, somewhere must be building a web-based spreadsheet, and it turns out that Zoho is that someone... or at least one of them.

The 'websheet' as they have dubbed it seems a good attempt to simply knock off Excel:

[from email]

Zoho Websheet
- Create web spreadsheet (websheet)
- Export websheet as excel / html
- Import any excel spreadsheet and use it online as websheet
- Use any excel functions (sum, avg, etc)
- Feel the same user experience as using excel

This is not yet ready for public, but will be out soon. More features
such as sharing, tagging, etc are in the works.

Zoho Websheet is definately pre-beta -- various functions don't work, it barfed on dollar signs, server errors pop up -- but considering the maturity of the other Zoho tools I expect that they will soon meet their ambitious goals, and then the last thread tieing me to Microsoft Office -- Excel -- can be cut.