Halfbrain's Smart Net App

Start-up beats Microsoft and other major vendors to the Net with a fully featured online spreadsheet.

Dan Littman, special to PC World

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Halfbrain.com's first offering, a spreadsheet written in pure dynamic HTML and called BrainMatter, was released to the public in a beta version this week. While many start-ups have released Web-based calendars and productivity tools on the Web, this release walks directly into the line of fire to compete with Microsoft Office and other vendors zeroing in on the "application service provider" model.

And BrainMatter is no mere symbolic challenge: it actually works. In fact, I found BrainMatter easy to use and surprisingly quick (I tested on a T1 line, however; opening worksheets would take longer over a dial-up modem connection).

After filling out a registration form that didn't ask any nosy questions, I was whisked to the "Solutions Gallery," a list of 200 or so BrainMatter templates. You'll find everything from business worksheets for preparing financial statements and managing inventory to family worksheets for keeping track of your kids' vaccination schedules and templates for managing your stock portfolio.

I selected a worksheet, saved a copy of it to my personal area, and replaced the data with my own numbers and tweaked some of the formulae. I also created some quick-and-dirty worksheets from scratch.

You can designate your worksheets as public or private, and Halfbrain.com can send e-mail messages containing the public links to your friends and colleagues. You can also write a help file that explains to visitors how to use your worksheet, or embed a BrainMatter worksheet in your own Web pages.

Pre-Release Wish List

BrainMatter, at least in its current beta form, still has some holes in it, the most glaring of which is the way it implements functions.

The package includes a reasonable set of mathematical, financial, time, and logic functions, as well as look-ups. For example, one clever look-up uses JPL images to let you jump around the solar system looking at the planets from different points of view). But to use a function, you have to type the entire thing with all its arguments into the cell, or copy and paste it from the help files. Unlike Excel, for example, BrainMatter has no pick list that pops whole functions into a cell.

Can you swap BrainMatter spreadsheets with Excel? The answer is yes, for now at least, but only if you use Excel 2000. Halfbrain.com representatives say the site will begin charging for the privilege in January, as part of a Premier package. The company has not yet released information on pricing and other membership features, or on other productivity software it is developing.

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